In the right position to make a profit
For most, yoga holidays are about chilling out in the lotus position and achieving bliss, but for Dublin entrepreneur Alan Wyley they represent a market opportunity with global potential.
In pursuit of this, he’s recently gone live with Connectedtrips, a travel website offering yoga, meditation, and wellness holidays in 1,000 centres in 18 countries. There are already several directory websites listing yoga holiday destinations but, according to Mr Wyley, this is the most comprehensive to date and the only one offering an online booking facility and the opportunity to review the various centres.
While yoga and meditation may have once been seen as an alternative lifestyle choice for a small number of people in Western countries, they have now become big business.
“The yoga market in the US alone is worth $5.5bn [€4.4bn]. Some 3% of the population in the Western world do yoga and 6% do mediation. We aim to open it up and grow the market,” says Mr Wyley.
He says there has been an increase in the number of people doing yoga and meditation but that growth in this market is also coming from people who are looking for new holiday experiences,
“People want something different and something that’s good for them,” he explains.
A practicing yogi and a part time meditation teacher, Mr Wyley identified a gap in the market when he was trying to book a holiday two years ago. As a chartered accountant who had previously been involved in growing and selling two successful companies, he was well qualified to create a company to fill this gap.
“I had already co-founded a customer relationship management company eWare which had $5m in revenue when it was sold. I also bought into and ran a payment company called EuroCommerce, which was also sold in 2003.”
This 10 years’ experience in sales, marketing and management gave him credibility and the skills to get Connectedtrips off the ground.
Looking at the yoga and meditation holiday options online, he observed that browsers could get millions of results and still be unable to find what they were looking for.
“Many of the centres are small operations and don’t have the budget to promote themselves effectively. They don’t have the money or expertise for search engine optimisation,” he says.
Deciding to create a global community of holiday centres, he believed there was an opportunity to get this industry working in the same way as hotels and airlines, so that browsers could simply search and book.
Approaching Enterprise Ireland with this business idea, he was given a feasibility study grant at the start of this year. Speaking to yoga, meditation, and wellness teachers, he confirmed that there was a demand and began working on designing a website and a company logo.
Although it wasn’t the best climate for fundraising, Mr Wyley had secured €250,000 from private investors by April. By this time, he had worked out a business plan with projections showing how the company would scale up.
Having originally set up the company from his home, he moved it to Dogpatch Labs and hired a developer to work on the website, as well as three marketing people to find suitable holiday centres and build the content of the site.
“In June we got approval from Enterprise Ireland for matching funding. We had a soft launch of our website which has 1,000 centres and now we are working on PR and marketing. Our next step is to attract customers to sign up and engage with us.”
Although the company is still in its infancy, Mr Wyley has very ambitious plans.
“Our aim is to create a multi-million euro business. We now have a staff of five — our aim is to get to 22 by 2014,” he says.
The company will earn revenue by taking 10% of the cost of the holiday booked. Mr Wyley expects to be in profit within two years.
The primary target markets are English-speaking countries, in particular the US, Canada, and the UK. Of the 1,000 sites already listed, 450 are in the US and Canada, 300 are in Ireland and the UK, and the rest are in Europe, India, Africa, and New Zealand.
“Our target customers are predominantly female — 70% of those booking these type of holidays are female, 70% are aged between 18 and 45, and 50% are single,” he says.
The plan now is to use social networks and the internet to grow the business.
“We will spread the word using existing connections. We now have 1,000 centres and expect, once we have become established, that centres will come to us.”
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