It started out as a lark – a travel website that would surprise Singaporeans with destination choices based on their profile and preferences – but when they got their first booking, the two co-founders found themselves scrambling to put together what they had promised.
From that start a year ago, there’s been no looking back for Zelia Leong and Felix Tan, co-founders of Anywhr, which sends people to places they might otherwise not have thought of going to in the first place.
Said Leong, “We plan surprise trips to get people out of their comfort zone. At first, we thought the idea too radical for Singapore where most people like to go to places that feel like Singapore, but cheaper.
“So we started it for fun, spoke about it in the media and gained some publicity. The first booking from a solo female traveller came as a surprise. At first we thought it was a test booking, then we said, we’d better make something happen.”
On Anywhr, customers select their holiday style – there’s also a wild card category, budget, dates of travel, purpose of trip and preferences – where they’ve been or LBGT-friendly places. And they do not know where they are going until two hours’ before departure.
Said Leong, “The trip booking is automated. Every trip is personalised. We put the flights and accommodation together and a customised booklet with their details and local recommendations. It’s not a Lonely Planet guide or Excel sheet of things to do, but more like recommendations around exploring.”
Zelia Leong: Anywhr was borne out of a hate of travel, not love.
In the early days, most customers were solo females but now the base has widened to include all kinds of profiles – couples, father-daughter trips, three-generational families, honeymooners. Trip duration is usually around five days and the budget can range from S$300-S$1,000.
“It’s more about psychographic rather than demographic – people who don’t want to follow the norm, who are sick of travelling the usual way.”
Anywhr sends people to the less travelled destinations so places like Bangkok, Hong Kong, Phuket, Bali and Kuala Lumpur are not included.
“Response has been better than we expected, we didn’t even expect to have a business and now we have a team of 15 and our own office,” said Leong.
What’s interesting is that Anywhr was borne out of a hate of travel, not love.
Said Leong, “Since I was young, I was lucky enough to travel with my family and we travelled everywhere. I remember one trip to Hong Kong, when I was 15, when I suddenly thought, I hate travelling. All we did was rush around, shopped and ate. And so I told my parents, I don’t want to travel anymore and I did not, until after graduating from polytechnic when I went to India alone for three weeks.
“I did ‘couchsurfing’ across India and had the best time of my life and discovered what travelling was really like.”
From then on, the travel bug bit hard and Leong travelled extensively as a solo traveller.
She knew she had to cut her teeth first though before taking the plunge as an entrepreneur, so she spent the first 10 years before and after graduating working in corporate jobs, three of which was spent in human resource with the Hyatt hotel group in Singapore.
“I learnt a lot about people skills. You can learn everything from the book but it’s people interaction that teaches you the most. My time at Hyatt also taught me about what it means to have quality standards and the importance of paying attention to details,” said Leong.
She joined the VC firm, Rocket Internet, as an intern. “When I was doing my masters in National University of Singapore, studying VC models, the professor mentioned Rocket Internet and so I joined them for my summer internship. I was to have travelled the trans-Siberian that summer but sacrificed that for the internship. I felt it was what I needed.”
She ended up working fulltime at Rocket Internet, handling its marketing. During her time there, she learnt about “how startups work, and how they shouldn’t, working with different cultures and how not to spend money”.
Her experience in human resource and working with startups gave her and co-founder Felix Tan, who was head of operations at Rocket Internet, the confidence to start Anywhr.
“Now I send people to live my dream,” Leong laughed.
She said the bootstrapped business has been profitable from the first day. “It cost us S$300 to start a domain and website. The customers pay first, and we don’t throw money around.”
Customers select their holiday style on Anywhr.
Currently, 90% of the business is from Singapore and the rest from Asia. It is keen to expand beyond Singapore to other Southeast Asian countries because as much as Singaporeans love to travel, the real opportunity is in capturing other bigger outbound markets.
With no travel experience between the two founders, the challenges they encountered were around execution and logistics, especially when gathering information about off-the-beaten-track destinations. “We couldn’t just scrape things off the Internet, it was up to us to go there to get the information and we have researchers and explorers on the ground. There’s a lot of back end planning and unforeseen stuff can happen, like local traffic.”
It also had to secure a travel agency licence and now the CTO of the Singapore Tourism Board sits on its advisory board.
Another challenge is raising brand awareness and most of this is done through word of mouth and through social media platforms like Instagram #goanywhr. It does not use influencers but creates its own content.
It is also a thin margin business. Leong said, “We put the experience first and we don’t do last minute tickets or last minute rooms.”
She declined to share the number of customers who have gone on Anywhr trips, just saying “couple of thousands” and when asked about repeats, she said, “we don’t track repeats, simply because we only started for a year and people don’t travel that much in a year to always book repeated trips, so only time will tell”.
Said Leong, “The key is managing expectations. You think you are someone but you are actually someone else so you might say, ‘take me for an adventure and I want to get lost’ when in reality, that would scare you. One customer we had bought the first flight home but on the whole, most of our customers are happy.
“The key is understanding our travellers based on the personal preferences they tell us after booking their trip.”
• All images credit: Anywhr