NoBore

Introduction:

The business traveling industry has steadily grown for the last years and is expected to further develop in the future (cf. Statista 2018). This development creates great opportunities for travel business to benefit from. This report introduces a business idea called NoBore that aims to enrich the leisure time of business travelers during their trips.

Problem and Trends:

Business travelers usually stay in hotels. Their evening activities are mostly limited to getting dinner, watching TV, browsing around or even working. Eager persons will try to do sightseeing or use the hotel gym, if available. At the same time, unhealthy food and sedentarism can be quickly adopted. Moreover, social contacts decrease due to numerous evenings spent in hotels. In the long term, this predictable evening program may result in frustration, higher workload or even sickness. Not only employees should be concerned about their work life balance, but also their employers have a duty to care about their staff working at other locations. Only employees with a healthy and variable travel style will stay motivated and efficient in the long term.
Fitting leisure activities in a professional trip is a growing trend called “Bleisure trips” (cf. Travel Weekly 2017) and is gaining popularity, especially among the newest generations. Recent statistics reveal millennials are showing increasing interest in this and many of them intentionally carve out some time or even extend their stay in order to improve their experience during their trip (cf. Forbes 2017, Telegraph 2016). As a result, companies are looking into their policies regarding professional travels.
Even so, what prevents travelers from doing activities they normally perform at home is a lack of knowledge about the environment. Moreover, people do not want to spend much time on research for evening activities. They prefer to find events and appointments quickly, in an uncomplicated way. This leads to the question how leisure activities for business travelers during their journeys can be offered in a simple and easy way.

Solution:

Our solution, “NoBore”, is a mobile app that enables quick and easy appointments after working days, like going for sports, dinner or cultural activities when business travelers are residing in unknown cities. Users enter their potential interests from a list of common activities for a given time window during their spare time. Once another person or persons commits the same interests, the backend of the app identifies a match and notifies all users to have a potential meeting. Furthermore, it suggests the possible venues and indicates their prices. For convenience, in-app payment is available.
Our app helps to overcome different the problems described above: The user does not need to search for activities but only selects what he/she wants to do. This saves the time for area exploration because the app knows the options in town. In addition, local businesses involved can promote their offers, such as theatre, tennis courts or ice skating for instance.

Business model:

The services NoBore offers are mainly aimed at three groups of customers, namely business travelers, local businesses offering leisure activities and corporations running health
care programs for their customers.  The latter segment are companies which provide their employees with a system allowing them to do sports in a plethora of places free of charge. The employees simply get a card (e.g. ‘Multisport’ 7 ) and can use it to participate in all activities offered by partners. We would like to extend this system to employees who move around a lot. Our qualitative interviews have shown that people staying less than two nights in a city are not a suitable target group, as they have too little time for activities.

The value proposed by our service comprises an engine helping users to spontaneously find peers for local activities. This includes sports, culture, dinner as well as connecting
people with businesses willing to provide possibilities to do these activities. The result of such a match is our users not being bored, hence the name of the project. A matching
mechanism similar to the one found in popular dating apps will be used to facilitate the connection between multiple users sharing similar interests. The analysis of the interviews revealed that people find orientation in a new environment often too time consuming and therefore frequently do not set out to engage in activities. Our service also addresses this problem.  Regarding the value proposed for our second major customer group – local businesses – they benefit from new customers that might not have come without NoBore. Thanks to an innovative integration and easy-to-use interface, they can save money in attracting these customers. The third potential customer segment, employers of business travelers, will benefit from a higher satisfaction of their staff including lower (indirect) cost for sickness and other factors.

Communication with the customers will mainly function through the mobile application as well as online/offline ads, i.e. promotional offers for certain cooperating businesses and possibly a promotional newsletter. Feedback and bug reports can be submitted through a form in the application or on the website. Direct interaction with NoBore employees is not planned on the user side. Local businesses will be dealt with by a sales team.

Regarding the channels we deem the classical combination of mobile application and website sufficient, as most successful enterprises in our domain do rather well with it.

Revenue will be generated through a commission paid by the local businesses offering their services on our platform. The fee will be charged automatically for an activity negotiated through the application. Travelers will benefit from our services without charges for most of the offers. Only in some cases, they are billed.  Additionally, local businesses can pay for their services being promoted in the app. It is intended to offer economic and premium advertisement models. Furthermore, on the long run, corporations employing business travelers might contribute a subscription based fee to use our app service.

Key resources will be the website and the mobile application as well as the partner network. Moreover, a clean, friendly design as well as a smooth user experience will make our service stand out.

Our companies’ key activities will be the creation and maintenance of the mobile application and the website, the creation of a network of user as well as local businesses offering their services and, to achieve this goal, marketing efforts to secure the critical mass of users needed to make such a service work.

The key partners will be, as already mentioned, local businesses offering venues/ activities/ equipment, etc. where our users can engage in activities spontaneously and without
having to sign up for membership. A simple example would be a gym letting people work out for an hourly fee or a business renting out kitchens for cooking. While some businesses will be on the customer side and will be required to pay fees to be in our system, others, especially smaller businesses or municipal facilities might be part of the  network for promotional reasons or simply free of charge and therefore on the partner side.

The cost of running our service will be composed of the cost of IT infrastructure, i.e. fees for an Infrastructure as a Service solution. Additionally, staff meaning engineering, sales and marketing professionals creating and maintaining the mobile application and website will cause costs. Moreover, expenses for advertising and marketing need to be considered. Finally, all other operational costs as rental of office space and support have to be taken into account.

Team:

Adrian Ackva

Paul German

Bérenger Nguyen Nhon