The Travel Marketing Podcast

Brennen

Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Propellic Travel Marketing Podcast.
My name is Brennan Bliss. I'm your host and we are now in quarter two of 2025. What a year it has been so far. Goodness gracious. Anyhow, I get the opportunity to interview Savvas Georgeau today.
He's the chief product officer and co-founder of Welcome Pickups. They are in 300 destinations, just about worldwide. And they are basically an airport transfer company with a lot more to offer.

They started out in tours and activities transformed into what essentially is a global marketplace for people who are landing in a destination and need a way to get to their final arrival destination.

So Savvas, an interesting thing about him is that he used to be a software engineer and he still has that expertise, but he's become chief product officer and he oversees marketing at Welcome Pickups with his business partner. And it's an amazing company. They've gone through stages of raising money and now they are past that. They've gone cashflow positive.
They are really strong performance marketers and it's pretty amazing how he's gone from not knowing anything about marketing to running such a large company. I mean, 2.5 million passengers is what's expected this year, which is not a small number of passengers. So with all that said, I'm going to jump right in.

All right. So we made it. We made it. us we're here. Happy Thursday. Thanks for joining me. guess this goes out on a Tuesday, but it's a Thursday today. We've known each other for a little while now, but we saw each other at a ITB a couple of weeks ago or now a month ago and figured we might as well schedule this and make it happen. I guess we'll get started just like quick story. Tell us about welcome pickups and how it started and how you've been involved.

Savvas

First of all, thanks for inviting me. And I still don't realize it's been a month since ITB. I was thinking it was a weeks ago.
Yeah. So Welcome Pickups, we started with Alex 10 years ago. The idea was to take a pretty commoditized service. It was actually a pivot. I don't know if people know that, but it was a pivot from local tours and activities type of things provided by locals that Alex was doing maybe too soon, 2014, 13. And yeah, I joined him and we started this to try to make a local experience of a more commoditized service, practically also service that we can have a lot of demand. And we'll talk a little bit more about demand and marketing here, right?
So the idea was to make a very local experience of an airport pickup, an airport taxi, if you prefer. We started from Athens, Greece. This is where I'm still are and working from. Greece is a very popular destination for summer. So we started here, we started offering kind of different airport pick-up service with English-speaking drivers, very curated cars, very curated drivers, and trying to make the drivers give an introduction about the city in these 40 minutes in the highway that are kind of lost part of the trip. We expanded with some more services there.
We started giving some SIM cards and some tickets, and then we also launched a kind of a side-seating ride, we call it. It's a multi-stop tour with a private car. We started with Athens and Santorini which is a very popular Greek destination as well and then we expanded that throughout Southern Europe. Fast forward 10 years later, plus a COVID gap. We are now in 120 countries as a service, primarily focusing on airport pickups and sightseeing rides, we have kind of stopped focusing that much on ancillary products, these type of SIM cards and tickets, etc. We are trying to be the best in this space, the best airport pickup available. Whenever you think about special tape or suggesting a solution for a friend to think about us. Today, the size of the business, let's say, we expect to welcome 2.5 million passengers this year. Not only in Europe anymore. Europe remains our main operational market, but we have a lot of customers in Central America and Southeast Asia as well. Practically 120 countries is what we have in the deck.

Brennen

So large scale operation, I guess you're doing everything. Like when you make a decision, you're not necessarily thinking about one market, which I think this is kind of fun because we talked to different companies in this show, ones that are focused on doing exceptional work in just a couple of destinations and then also companies that are in 5,000 destinations. So I'm curious with 2 to 300, what marketing channels generally have been working for you.

Savvas

Yeah, you know, travel has this origin and destination situation, right? So origin countries for us remain primarily North and Western Europe and Western countries. But destination wise, it's very different. We don't really do very, let's say, destination based marketing, to be honest. We do destination based things in general, mostly because of operations, right? And how services work differently in different airports, different areas, different cultures. But marketing wise, I think the main difference where this nation is basically the, let's call it AOV. We call it GMP, but it's the average order value, right? So it's a different cost for the main product. We have the main airport to the main city area. It's much different in Milan, where the airport is in the middle of nowhere, you have to, the private ride is more than a hundred euros compared to Bali or Sri Lanka, where for different reasons, the AOV is much lower. So I think the main difference is there in the unit economics type of thing for us.

Of course, then different countries, different languages, we kind of support now multilingual and multi-currency solutions like imagine whatever an OTA has to do to be viable everywhere. But the AOV is the main differentiation today. And then some things that we notice in user patterns. pretty much the harder, conceptually at least, the harder destination is to maybe create some sort of fear that I will be ripped off if I don't prebook something, right?
So even Greece has this type of... For Americans, Greece could be a potentially a tax driver can rip me off. So you see a little bit difference in conversion rates and things like that based on destinations, but this we kind of observe.
We understand that in London, maybe conversion rate might be little bit lower than Cairo, for example, because the need of a private prebook solution prepaid. I'm not talking so much about security, but even the prepayment part, which is a very simple thing, right? Can make a difference in conversions there.

Brennen

It's funny because I generally will... Actually, I've taken a Welcome Pickups ride in Greece. Last time I was there in Athens, I think that's the first time I took a Welcome Pickups ride. And I remember the experience. It was pretty seamless. I know that I didn't really have to worry about anything. Driver got there, got a notification, walked out, got dropped off at the airport. It was as easy as you'd expect and hope. And I look forward to doing that in Bali later this year. I'm on customer acquisition for channels like taking down driving down into what's most important. I guess diving deep into marketing, what is the most important KPI that you follow across all of your marketing channels?

Savvas

Yeah, so maybe I need to explain something first. We're still a very weird mix of how we generate demand, right? We have 50 % B2C and there you can have the same ads, any display ads, SEO, brand, repeat customers, etc. And we have another 50%, which is surprisingly exactly the same still today, which is more B2B. And it's not really B2B. We don't have a huge buyer that buys a thousand welcome pickups, right? It's more of a B2B2C type of thing where partners introduce the service to their guests. So can be hotels, selling airport pickups to the guests, it can be an airline as an ancillary product, it can be an OTA, etc. So I guess when we talk marketing, maybe we talk a little bit more about B2C in this context.

Brennen

Yeah, I would say let's stick to B2C for this. I think that's going to be the most helpful for sure. I do want to get later into like the B2C approach just through agents, because I think that's interesting.

Savvas

Yeah, yeah, sure. So, B2C, wherever we pay money, it's ROAS. So, pretty straightforward. I think ROAS today is even driving a little bit higher in priority than the total demand generated. We're starting a little bit there, to be very honest, these last few quarters, because ROAS becoming the number one priority, maybe you suffocate a little bit of demand. So you get a little bit less bookings, but with better unit economics. Practically, it should be both. Now, deeper into paid channels it can be conversion rate. So we try to optimize and see, you know, what type of intent pretty much we can bring to this product, which is pretty unique, not unique, but it has some dynamics. So for example, if you haven't booked both your flight and your accommodation, you cannot practically book welcome pickers. So it should be pretty last minute. It should be pretty high intent keywords or pretty high intent landing pages. Otherwise you practically have costs and clicks and whatever that practically cannot get reconverted. And there is no real micro conversion in the context of airport pickup. Either you book or you don't book. I mean, it's not so much about signing up and, you know, get the loyalty or something.
So I think CVR conversion rate becomes more more important because it kind of signals the correct intent that we have in the demand that we generate. we have pretty much similar to OTAs, guess, we have two big steps. We have the search step, we call it quote and then have the book step.
So we monitor both these conversion rates, landing to search and search the book, of course, which is the most important. But we get all these signals and we actually don't even get ourselves, we push the signals to the platforms directly now. And we try to optimize on generating demand that will have good CVR even on the landing to quote and of course, quote conversion. But there are rules today down to the fact that it might even be okay to have a little bit less demand if yours keeps being where it's supposed to be.

Brennen

Yeah. Understood. That's interesting. You're talking about ROAS being a target on the SEO side. I read a case study somewhere. I forget where it was. I think it was maybe the web developer that you worked with that you have done a lot of programmatic content across all your destinations on the SEO side. How do you track ROAS from an SEO standpoint? It's a much harder thing to do, right?

Savvas

Sure. Actually, we don't do so much programmatic. We do more of content marketing, I would say. It's a question if we should do more programmatic. So we started with SEO very early and we very lucky at the beginning. was 2016. The product and I was designing and creating the destination guides, let's call them, that will present all your transportation options. So we started with low-intent keywords that are how to get from Athens Airport City Center. We had content about the metro and the subway and the buses and everything plus us and then more high intent. I think it was an investment. I mean, I don't think we did a very big analysis in ROAS every quarter, for example. It was kind of a yearly investment, south of half a million, but north of 200k, euros or dollars pretty close these days. But we were saying, okay, let's do another quarter of a million publishing. Let's make sure we spend this money as possible, let's have good design in the templates, good editors. You know, before LLMs, who were actually paying people based on words, either on translation or...

Brennen

Which is like, the funny thing is it sounds wild, but that was a year ago, like a year or two ago.

Savvas
Yeah, not more than a year and a for sure. yeah. It was very, very recent, especially on translation. It was crazy. We had a lot of tooling how we measure exactly what you translated so that we don't pay you for the end and the keywords anyway, was crazy. But I think it was an investment and it started being like 5X year one return. But this was a retro analysis. It was never running, let's say, ROAS type of investment. You never know, right? You couldn't predict how much money you will make from a landing page five years down the road, right? From a guide or a transportation guide. I think we still increase ROAS of this investment. We still do maybe similar level of investment, but in a much larger number of cities. So pretty much lower if you divide it by cities and destinations. And yeah, I think ROAS and SEO is harder and I wouldn't suggest trying to make it very close to performance, but for sure you should do something so that you can compare, right?
Because pretty much we target similar keywords that we make, we bid for. Not exactly the same, but many of them are similar. And there's also a rumor when we rumor internally, we're struggling to understand if us spending much more kind of decreased our SEO visibility because we were ranking a lot of times it was us number three result and number one in ads, right? And we do primarily same search. We don't do a lot of display or other. Yeah, I don't know if that covers but it was an investment I want to say. Yeah.

Brennen

I think it does. I think the other piece is, talked a little bit about this already, the booking journey. When someone is going and purchasing their transfer, they can't do that without having a flight and hotel booked. I'm curious, do you like leverage any partnerships with any third parties to be able to target people when they're ready to book after they've booked their flights and hotels?

Savvas

The quick answer is no. And the little bit longer is that we have tried, but it didn't really work. I mean, I don't know exactly what you mean. In the B2C space, there used to be some companies, I don't remember the names now, but these are the same companies that used to do the ads at the back of the boarding passes. I don't remember the name.

Brennen

Interesting. That's not like a thing here. I know that's a thing in Europe, but that's not really in the States.

Savvas

Yeah, it's not anymore, guess, but maybe four or five years ago we have been reached by some companies that, you know, they claimed and maybe it worked, but it didn't work for us for some test period, that they work with OTAs, and they do something that I don't think it's allowed anymore. It's kind of a third party cookie tracking. And then they create audiences that they can share with you through a MetaConnect type of thing.
Literally the same company maybe understand that, you know, this business is dying, so I have to do something else. We tried it with some audiences. First of all, was a little bit spooky of how it works. And then it didn't really work for us that well. I think the search terms can define this intent a little bit. And then if you have the quote step, the search step, right, and we have first part tracking there so we can see server side pretty much. So we can see how long is the booking window of the search?
So if your audience or your targeting is creating demand for a month ahead, searches for a month ahead, not bookings, then maybe you can iterate there and see what, how, and can be even device targeting. And desktop searches for us are pretty bad naturally. They're more on the earlier stages and maybe somebody is just looking around, but mobile visitors, even from 5G, even better target because most probably they're traveling tomorrow.

Brennen

What's your typical booking window look like?

Savvas

There's no average like it's a bucket. We have at least 25 % more than a month ahead. And we have another 25 % less than 24 hours ahead. So pretty last minute. And there is the conversion rate, I mean, the rest is in the middle as you can imagine, but 50 % less than a week ahead, let's say.
And this changes after Christmas, the average booking window becomes 60 days, right? And in June, the average can go down to 7 days.
We monitor buy rather than millions and averages a lot, but the conversion rate is times more, not even percentages more. So under 24 hours can be three times more than a month ahead.

Brennen

Okay. Noted, noted. I think it's interesting and fun to sit in the end of the booking journey because that's something that you see very frequently with tourism activities, which I also find it ironic, not ironic, but coincidental. That's the space that you started in. I'm actually kind of curious. Tell me a little bit about the tourism activities business from 2014.

Savvas

Yeah.

Brennen

I would just want to hear what you were doing. Like we don't have to spend too much time on it, but I am curious.

Savvas

Yeah, sure, sure. First of all, this was Alex's company, like dopios.com was the name. Alex is my co-founder at Welcome Pickups. He started that from San Francisco as part of Haka Filon of Weekend or something. Dopios means local in Greek and it's some sort of espresso, Dopio, anyway, but it's the local in Greek. So it was a marketplace with locals offering like City Tours and bar hopping and things like that. kind of Airbnb experiences today but the very, let's say, local and unprofessional, good term, not really bad, but freelancers offering tours in their city.

The marketplace was going great in the supply side, so maybe a thousand destinations, even small islands. And it was not only in Greece, right? They had great listing with what they offer, but demand was very, very hard because you couldn't really target everything. You're not getting your guide or viator.
And even if you could, it's not exactly the same. You're looking for a specific demographic. And then at some level, I think the main hit was that you couldn't do B2B2C or B2B deals because this is a more scary thing to resell. Right? So the marketplace couldn't run on the demand side and especially on the B2B side. So I joined him as a product manager back in the day to do some tests with other tools. had some free time actually, while switching jobs. So I had maybe six months that I didn't really have something else. I mean, the reviews and things like that. So I did some tests part-time and I did a premium tours just to make it more expensive, maybe more professional so that we can actually go to some hotels and resell it, right?
And I did also the airport pickups, which was a heavy bit to see service that I knew I checked basically that we can find search intent so we could drive bookings. The sad thing is that not so many people start for local bike tour around Acropolis. I mean, this is not really a big audience or, you know, bar hopping tour, right?
Okay. Maybe some people, but it's not that.

Brennen

I know that there, my favorite thing about Athens, I think I mentioned this to you, is that in Athens there is a bar called Rooster, which is a gay bar. And it's right across the street from a church and they say 5 a.m. you can hear both the church bells and Lady Gaga at the same time. And we're now on a food tour in Athens.

Savvas

Yeah, I mean, these are amazing things. Like the experience that you cannot really think you need, so you cannot really search before you arrive. So it's this paradox, right? So it's great, but there's no search audience. is not exactly that. It's an inspiration that maybe you need to show up here and there and present it, but Dopio just didn't want us to do that for at this period. So we switched to this business.

Brennen

Yeah, absolutely. So scooting back onto the current welcome pickups. So you said you have different, but like the travel purchase window, it's such a long process. The travel purchase journey, can be 120 to 210 days. I was on a podcast with Bokun yesterday or on a webinar with a res tech called Bokin. And I was asking the host of it, like how long she spent planning her Thailand trip. She said it ended up being like 210 days when we mapped it back, like when she had the initial inspiration, which makes it really hard in travel for attribution.
First off, first question is, you do anything that's upper funnel for travel marketing? Do you do anything to inspire the trip or are you mostly just capturing bottom of the funnel?

Savvas

I think we do nothing in Top funnel.

Brennen

No worries. It's totally fine. So your first touch point is when someone has decided they need a transfer, they're trying to figure out transportation, maybe middle of the funnel, like how to get around in the city. What do you give value to from an attribution standpoint? Is it the first touch? it data-driven throughout the experience? it last touch? you even use attribution models?

Savvas

Yeah, exactly.
Look, we have two, unfortunately, two parts where we measure success in these types of things. One is our first part, the cookie and server side, right? Which goes directly on our, you know, have custom e-commerce platform, of course, custom CRM and everything is, especially in the B2C, everything is in-house now. So there, we have our own tracking of first and last channel basic in the, let's say, Power BI level of reporting, that's the company's reporting. We do first that's the attribution. Of course, the marketing teams using the tools of the platforms, I think they do now the dynamic, whatever it's called now, I don't know. And they drive the ROAs not based on first. And this is kind of everybody's happy, but we attribute and they can make their algorithms work better. Of course, attributing a lot in the last, etcetera, which makes sense. But company wise, we're still doing a lot of first, but we don't have that much of a problem because a lot of our bookings are, I think we have maybe 80 % at least in the B2C space, maybe 75 or 80% are same day. So it's not so much further away. We also don't do a lot of free marketing to be honest. I mean, it never really worked very well for us, maybe because of the period that is pretty short. And then we also do very effectively cart abandonment and emails and push and these type of things are where we are actually nailing the type of things.

Savvas

Yeah, exactly.

Brennen

What's the app adoption rate look like? Like how much of your business has been done through the app?

Savvas

Can be 25%, but we never acquire intentionally at least to the app. We don't have any ads that say download the app. We always push people to the mobile web experience. We always optimize for the mobile web experience. Even our whole app is exactly the same in mobile web in a ridiculous level. There is nothing extra in the app. It's a big question. I think that maybe we'll be behind there because we did some more technical changes anyway. Maybe we will start app acquisition.
But you know, I want to be very realistic. I wouldn't, if it was not my company, I would have deleted the app until my next trip most probably. don't know if you're traveling every month, maybe. I mean, I'm a product person, right? I'm thinking about the users a lot, sometimes more than the finance team or marketing, but I think the mobile web should be perfect. And then maybe some of your email touch points should be perfect. And then if you have more capacity, maybe you make a Kickass app.
But primarily you have to deliver everything in web and email infrastructure for us at least.

Brennen

Yeah, understood. Understood. So actually it's funny because I have my list of questions. Like I knew you had an app and that happened to be my next question that was in my list. So we'll just skip over that. You mentioned you've got push notifications. You've got email, a card abandonment, which is all really important and good for this is not like a considered purchase necessarily. It's a necessary component to the travel experience. It's something they have to get and it's not super expensive.

Savvas

Exactly. We call it essential step of the trip.

Brennen

So what is like the minimum time required? Are you at the point like where you can treat it like Uber and book immediately and get a car shortly or what's the time notice required?

Savvas

No, we're not. It's not in the narrative. Let's say we're not trying to do it. I think we try to be everywhere two hours before operation and it's still very challenging. We have Barcelona last year and think Istanbul, some cities we did one hour last year, but the objective is somewhere there. At least before you board the plane to be able to book. We don't want to compete on the on-demand space. And it seems it's enough actually taking from our distribution engines and some sort of competition tech. I think most of our private pre-booked services are up more than 12 hours, maybe 24 hours before. So we capture all this space very effectively now.

Brennen

It sounds like there's not necessarily that much demand to book that quickly because they might be using, I mean, they're probably using an on-demand ride service if they're going to wait till the very end.

Savvas

Yeah, plus don't forget we are a marketplace so we have to connect you with the driver also and we don't want to compete with the Ubers of the world in the driver side as well. It's also very, very challenging to do that. So I think it's a very sweet spot which addresses 90 % of the people who want to book welcome pick up. Maybe we'll lose some customers in the process, but very, you know.

Brennen

Well, it's the planners, right? That's good. A good business doesn't require the ability to service every single customer, right? It's like you pick what is.

Savvas

Exactly. Same as we don't do satins, we don't even do a second stop, which we should maybe add.

Brennen

That sounds like too much dev time. No, I'm kidding.

Savvas

No, we're thinking it's a private transfer. So why a second stop you go to the same hotel, right? So maybe it becomes more of a sati. I think we'll do it soon you have people who book back to their origin.

Brennen

You tech, right? You're a Ruby on Rails background developer, right?

Savvas

Yeah.

Brennen

Okay.

Savvas

I'm an engineer in principle. I'm using a lot of this knowledge in product and marketing and commercial now, but yeah.

Brennen

I'm proud of you. It's impressive. You're smarter than me by miles. So I did some poking around, didn't only find that you were a software engineer. I also found that you do some interesting work on the marketing side. So Meta has an ads library where you can go and look at any Meta ads that anybody's running. And something that occurred to me there is you have a lot of B2B ads. You mentioned that 50 % of your business is B2B. Obviously there's an end customer.
Between the B2B, is there like API driven side and then also an agent driven side?

Savvas

Look, two years ago it was primarily hotels. Like it was long-tail hotels, not hotel chains, like local hotels in Greece, Barcelona, and Spain, sorry, Turkey, Rome, etc. And what we were doing, we are white labeling a solution for them. So it's like booking the whatever Istanbul Hilton airport pickups, something like that. Used to be the driver of our B2B.
Today we do API, so we have few OTA deals that can be very, very big. And we kind of try to not sell all our inventory, let's say to them sometimes. So we balance it between API and OTAs and the other deals. The new channel is Travel Agents, Long Tail Travel Agents again. I'm talking about huge companies out there. I didn't even know them. Yeah. No, but I mean, and I was surprised when we started that product, we have today maybe a thousand Travel Agents that have booked at least one booking. And maybe we have a half of them having gonna go every month. So we're talking about long tail moment op, I don't know the size of these businesses, but they do 50 or a hundred trips per year. They might be organizing wedding things, production things. I don't know exactly what all is common.

Brennen

That’s 6 to 10 grand in bookings, right? Like that's not a small

Savvas

That's exactly what I was thinking to share. I was thinking of this as a dying segment. I don't know if it's shrinking or growing, but it's huge. I mean, we've been doing this for a very, very decade.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I was maybe, you know, in this LinkedIn, my own world, whatever, that nothing, nothing exists beyond tech companies. don't know, but it's a surprisingly self-growing market. have very good NPS there as well. We have a self sign up and self service. These people can just sign up and do everything themselves. don't even need support or success or other types of things. And you know, can be 10,000 in a few years from now. So that's why we reinforce some of these messages through Meta and LinkedIn, if I'm not wrong. I think we do maybe similar size or even more on LinkedIn.
There we also have a thing that it's kind of our own thing. I don't know if all businesses can do it, but we used to be booked by travel agents from our B2C flow naturally, like somebody had to arrange your wedding in Mykonos, whatever trip, was Googling Mykonos Airport taxi because he had no partnership or no local partner there.
So they were discovering us from these B2C funnels, and we could understand from their data points, let's say that this is travel agent booking, maybe even from the professional domain, the email. So we kind of have some questions if you're booking on behalf of somebody else, and then we try to understand if we asked them literally, are you a travel agent? They say yes.
And then we give them access to the platform with a kind of funnel and steps in marketing automation. So I think maybe even half of our travel agents today are a product of this. Our B2C bookers who understood we can have B2B platform and they jumped in the B2B side. So it's kind of organic in, I call it reverse funnel and we reverse the B2C to become B2B there. I don't know if it's relevant for every business, but it's a thing that if you do good product approach, like explaining to the user, asking permission, et cetera, you can actually produce a lot of this. And at some ultimate level, you can even attribute some of the, I'm thinking in the future, maybe if we could, we can spend some more money to acquire B2C because we know that the percentage of this will eventually become more long-term users because some of them are always B2B. If you're advertising in Santorini Airport taxi, let's say one of the 100 bookings will be a travel agent.
So you might as well try to get this in your ROAS module if you have the time and the budget to do this type of connection there. Yeah, that's why you see meta ads about travel agents. It's another push in this funnel.

Brennen

Here you go. So I know that you mentioned conversion rate. You mentioned bookings. What do you think travel companies and travel marketers in terms of metrics are paying attention to today?

Savvas

Isn’t that enough?

Brennen

No, I mean, those are enough. If there's nothing else it’s totally fine. If the bookings are enough.

Savvas

No, I think it's a mix of, mean, it depends on the size of the business, right? Moreover, I mean, we're also a self-sustaining company, we're not raising money anymore, so we have to have our finances in good condition. So I think GMV or revenue also become top metrics. Some level it's against targets. I think travel companies should have always kind of a good prediction ahead because you have a lot of money coming in, there's money coming out, especially as a marketplace.
So you need to have good forecast, let's say, and ideally you need to see your curves because it's also very seasonal, right? So it gets a little bit more frustrating to just see bookings, bookings naturally increase in this period, it's summer is approaching for us. So you need to have famous airlines, I think they do this a lot, they have some booking curves and they try to have every year the curve higher per destination, etcetera. Primarily in GMV and revenue, want to say, if your margin is fixed and then bookings for sure because booting means users and maybe if you have good repeatability, users is even more important. But then conversion rate and I think if you go deeper, you should make sure you store a little bit more information, not personal, but all the search. For example, you have the searches, right? We used to be not saving everything about the search. We were not saving, for example, number of passengers, number of luggage, pieces of luggage in a search moment, right? We were thinking, okay, who cares? We don't need this. But the more...properties, let's say you start saving for every search and the more you start building down on your CVR or something based on those, you understand that there may be some opportunities in the single passenger, in the family booking flow, which is, it used to be for us like three, four years ago, it was the same thing. We never distinguished between those two.

Brennen

This is an incredible story of what y'all have accomplished. I love companies that start in small spaces and are able to expand into multiple locations, especially become, you know, it sounds like cashflow positive, get off of the investments and build a really strong and successful business.
I guess you taught yourself marketing, it sounds like. Like this is not something you necessarily went to school for. You went to school for software. I'm curious. We're talking to marketers everywhere from their first year in marketing all the way up to VPs of marketing and CMOs at very large travel organizations.
For those younger, more junior marketers, what would you tell them to like help get them, maybe give them some confidence and what should they focus on?

Savvas

Yeah, I'm trying to think when they will listen to it. Because a year later, maybe some things are irrelevant already. I'm using a lot my technology background and you know, there's this space called Martech or something, which I think is exactly where I can be. But I knowing more and more about data and math is definitely theory of math. But definitely some of these concepts start getting a little bit more complex.
So some basic data analysis, engineering is a skill that maybe everybody will understand. It's needed a little bit later. So the sooner you have it, maybe you have some adds when you start talking in a more serious position. I would say, I don't know, I think still some of the books are relevant out there. I don't know if people still read Seth Godin or Avinash Kausten, this type of people, but especially on measurement. Yeah, I'm pro-learning, even if it's not 100 % related to your task at hand, right? I think some of the key concepts like the permission to do marketing to some person and some of the, how we base copyright and how we talk simply. I still remember this handwriting from Ogilvy explaining how you should be just talking simply, don't say very difficult words, but it depends. I think most people will start thinking marketing is a performance marketing thing, so they are definitely data and analysis is more important.
Assuming CRM marketing and, you know, top funnel marketing will still be a profession and not done by LLMs. I think basic books about marketing are still very important because the principles are the same. We're still human beings. We're still feeling we have to make a decision based on some brands' understanding. So I think these are still very relevant. Yeah.

Brennen

That's amazing. I appreciate you. I'm so happy we were able to finally do this. think the scaled, like you're not an OTA, you're a marketplace, obviously, but I mean, it functions very similarly in the terms of your multi-destination. You're offering a somewhat consistent product. mean, obviously you don't own the cars and you don't, the drivers are not employees based on my understanding, but it's operationally difficult, but also incredibly rewarding when you figure it out. Congrats on your growth and success.
It's been wonderful chatting with you. appreciate it. Is there anything else you think we should chat about?

Savvas

Thank you. Thank you. I don't know. I kind of enjoy not talking so much about AI or stock markets today. The day that, you know, things might change before the economy, I don't know.
Hopefully not so bad, but yeah.

Brennen

We're gonna talk about that now?

Savvas

No, not really. Not really. No.
Brennen

In my webinar in front of 800 people yesterday, I said, yes, I know how the world feels about the United States right now. We're not going to talk about it.

Savvas

Yeah, no, think we should win some time. We're still having so much more important things to do. And, know, because this becomes a prediction discussion, which I kind of, or speculation, which I'm not so good at as an engineer as you can understand. So I'm not good at this speculations discussions. I want the data first.

Brennen
Of course.
You deserve the data. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. This was great. And I'll see you at the next conference.

Brennen

Thanks, Brennen. Thanks a lot.