ttglive.com Jean-Pierre Nadir
Easyvoyage.com
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on these new acquisitions. However, Nadir believes the high subscriber numbers of the new acquisitions will play a key role. By purchasing FSI, Easyvoyage is adding an
extra four million subscribers to its newsletter database for the UK. With Dealchecker, it is adding another one million. For Europe overall it claims to have the largest database, standing at eight million active subscribers. Travelzoo, by comparison, has 4.5 million subscribers. Some OTAs are trying to avoid paying Google
for keywords, such as On Holiday Group’s recent attempt to “bypass” the search engine giant, but Nadir says he doesn’t have this problem. “We are Google independent,” he claims. “And
Pizzas, publishing and web portals...
Selling pizzas gave Jean-Pierre Nadir a grounding that has helped him make an aggressive expansion into the UK online travel market, with further acquisitions on the horizon. Matthew Parsons reports
J
ean-Pierre Nadir’s entrepreneurial spirit was in evidence from the age of 16, selling crepes in Brittany. A few years later this grew into “Pizza Trente”
where he sold pizzas to office workers in Paris, guaranteeing delivery in under 30 minutes. At 21 he sold the business to Domino’s, which was buying up small pizza companies, before moving into travel magazine publishing. But this early experience with Domino’s
provided good grounding for his latest move, as booking portal Easyvoyage has just bought three travel websites for a total of ¤10m. “We cannot grow organically”, says Nadir,
Easyvoyage’s chief executive, “so we had to buy existing companies.”
The acquisitions comprise FSI (an e-marketing
agency), and price comparison websites Travel Jungle and Dealchecker – the latter
represents the lion’s share of the acquisitions, at over ¤5m. Easyvoyage, which Nadir founded in 2000, calls itself an “infomediary”, gathering large amounts of data and providing “highly qualified traffic” to its online travel agency partners. It claims it is currently unique in the market.
“I respect all our competitors, but none of them have the same service,” Nadir says. The portal allows users to read destination
features, reviews, compare prices, subscribe to special deals and join its community.
Strength in numbers In 2010 Easyvoyage generated ¤450m worth of sales for its partners, and its own revenue for 2010 was ¤17.5m, with profits of ¤5.7m. Next year it is aiming for ¤800m worth of sales, and for ¤1bn in 2013 – so a lot is counting
Google is trying to kill all the intermediaries. “We are in a good position compared with our competitors. About 30% of our business is direct access (via newsletters), we have special editorial content, deals with TV channels and newspapers, such as The Independent. And now 2% of our traffic comes from our iPhone app, which has been downloaded 100,000 times.” The structure, or “family”, at Easyvoyage also helps avoid placing all of the eggs in one basket, Nadir says. There are 100 people, comprising 25 developers, 25 journalists, 25 sales people and 25 marketing staff.
High street future While Nadir believes travel is increasingly heading towards online, he still believes the future for high street agents is positive. “Everyone says it is dead, however there is
a future for the high street. But agents must focus on their clients, not on destination knowledge, or suppliers, or hotels. You can’t beat meta-search. Thanks to the internet, everyone is now an expert, a specialist. “Agents must know their clients’ family
history, birthdays, their personalities.” However, he also predicts consolidation in his own sector, where Easyvoyage operates alongside TripAdvisor, Travelzoo and Kayak. He predicts “lots of mergers” on the same
scale as the airline industry and does not rule out a sale of Easyvoyage: “If somebody wanted to buy Easyvoyage, the first question would be: what’s the price?”
Nadir adds the focus for this year is on the UK, but he’s not ruling out grabbing a bigger slice of the market beyond 2012. “The DNA of travel is worldwide, you must
develop. So we must inject – possibly in 2012 we could go public, get new investors. “Our next acquisition is likely to be in Scandi-
navia in 2012. Then we will look at Russia or the Netherlands in 2012. We operate in five countries now, and are aiming for eight by 2012.”
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