WAYN (website)

Last updated

Where Are You Now? Ltd
Type of site
Travel & lifestyle social network
Founded2002;22 years ago (2002)
Founder(s) Peter Ward, Jerome Touze, Mike Lines
IndustryInternet
Employees21 (July 2016)
Divisions London, Cape Town, Szczecin
URL www2.wayn.com
Current statusactive

WAYN (an acronym for Where Are You Now?) is a social travel network. [1] Its stated goal is to help discover where to go and meet like-minded people. WAYN was the brain child of entrepreneurs Jerome Touze and Peter ward and was founded in 2002. [1]

Contents

Like other social networking services, WAYN enabled its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can search for other users and link them to their profiles as friends. The Founders part exited the business in 2006 in a $11m deal [2] to DFJ Esprit and valuing the company at $46m. [3] In 2015 it claims to have over 20 million users. [4] By 2013, the site grew to 22 million registered users, growing at a daily rate of 5,000 new users and adding 25,000 new travel photos every day. [5] In late 2016, the website was bought by Lastminute.com in an asset purchase deal at terms that were not disclosed. [6]

The acquisition means Wayn's database of users and content will be added to The Travel People, [7] lastminute.com's media division. The Travel People claims to reach 43 million monthly unique visitors every month across all its brands (Lastminute.com, Rumbo, Volagratis, Bravofly and Jetcost).

History

WAYN was founded in 2002 in London by Jerome Touze (Co-CEO), Peter Ward (Co-CEO) and Mike Lines (CTO), after two of them came up with the idea to connect people based on their location while having a few beers in their local pub. WAYN initially grew through word-of-mouth and reached almost 50,000 members by the end of 2004. Following its relaunch in May 2005 it reached over 2.5 million members by the end of 2005. On 26 March 2012 the site claimed "over 19.1m members". [4]

The business started with initial seed funding in 2003 from the original founder of Friends Reunited. [8]

In 2006, the WAYN Founders managed to complete a part exit of the company for $11 million from DFJ Esprit and attracting famous internet entrepreneurs as investors such as Brent Hoberman (ex-founder of lastminute.com), Hugo Burge (CEO of cheapflights.co.uk), Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips (ex-founders of Active Hotels) and Constant Tedder (ex-CEO of Jagex, an online gaming company) and was referred to at the time as the 'Myspace of Travel'. [9]

Services

WAYN users may post photos from their trips. Registered users send and receive messages using email, discussion forums, E-cards, SMS, and instant messages and Q&A. WAYN provides a destination browsing service to discover Where to go next and WAYN members can interact with each other and ask questions on the destinations through a Questions & Answers service. The site also provides Social Opinions which generated over 25,000 opinions daily in 2014. [10] In 2015, WAYN has announced major strategic partnerships with Booking.com to offer hotels booking to its users [11] as well as Viator to offer tours and activities booking. [10]

Contact import

Like many other social media sites, WAYN encourages its users to invite their friends which in turn leads to the contacts of the members to receive an invitation to join. In 2006, some members have vented their frustration claiming they were not aware that an invitation would be sent to their contacts. [12] [13] The company acknowledged that this process could be improved and has since changed the way in which these invitations get generated and has also signed up with Return Path, one of the few whitelisting companies in the world which certifies Emails Best Practice. [1]

Use

WAYN Alexa Internet traffic ranking was 12,251 as of March 2017 down more than 2,000 position from the prior year. [14] It claimed in 2013 to house user data for over 22 million users in 193 different countries. [15]

Monetisation

WAYN.com commercialises its website through advertising. The site also offers a membership service (VIP) for users who wish to access to travel and lifestyle benefits. More recently, the site launched a travel booking service for users to book their hotels and tours globally. [1]

Related Research Articles

Travelocity.com is an online travel agency owned by Expedia Group. It has 12.4 million monthly unique visitors, making it the third most popular website owned by Expedia Group, after Expedia.com and Hotels.com.

lastminute.com is an online travel and leisure retailer.

Sabre Corporation is a travel technology company based in Southlake, Texas. It is the largest global distribution systems provider for air bookings in North America. American Airlines founded the company in 1960, and it was spun off in 2000.

Tripadvisor, Inc. is an American company that operates online travel agencies, comparison shopping websites, and mobile apps with user-generated content.

Cheapflights is a travel fare metasearch engine. The website is part of the Kayak.com subsidiary of Booking Holdings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VK (service)</span> Russian social media and social networking service

VK is a Russian online social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg. VK is available in multiple languages but it is predominantly used by Russian speakers. VK users can message each other publicly or privately, edit these messages, create groups, public pages, and events; share and tag images, audio, and video; and play browser-based games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agoda</span> Singaporean online travel agency

Agoda.com is an online travel agency catering primarily to consumers in the Asia-Pacific region, with headquarters in Singapore and operations in Bangkok, Thailand. Agoda facilitates reservations for lodging, flights, ground transportation, and activities. It is a subsidiary of Booking Holdings.

Rome2Rio is an Australian online multimodal transport journey planner offering traveling services globally. The company is based in Melbourne, Australia. It is owned by the German online travel comparison and booking website Omio.

9flats is an online marketplace enabling people to lease or rent short-term lodging. The company does not own any lodging; it is merely a broker and receives commissions from both guests and hosts in conjunction with every booking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tripping.com</span> Online search engine

Tripping.com, a subsidiary of HomeToGo, is an online search engine and review aggregator for vacation rentals. It aggregates over 10 million listings in more than 150,000 cities worldwide. It is based in San Francisco, California. Tripping.com partners with and displays listings from booking websites including Booking.com, HomeAway, Vrbo, FlipKey, Roomorama, Interhome, Novasol, Wimdu, ZenRentals, Bedycasa, WayToStay, Gloveler, HolidayVelvet, 9flats, AlwaysOnVacation, RedAwning, and Housetrip. Users can search by price, ratings, location and features and amenities.

eDreams is an online travel agency based in Barcelona, Spain, that offers deals in regular and charter flights, low-cost airlines, hotels, car rental, dynamic packages, holiday packages and travel insurance.

Roomkey, formerly Room Key, was a hotel metasearch engine. Roomkey was a joint venture founded by Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott International, and Wyndham Worldwide, or their respective affiliates. There were over 45,000 hotels in 150 countries listed on Room Key, including 60 brands.

Raileurope.co.uk is an online booking service for train travel in the United Kingdom and Europe. It sells tickets through its website and via its smartphone app which is available on iOS and Android platforms.

Lastminute.com N.V. is the owner of several travel brands including lastminute.com, Volagratis, Rumbo, Bravofly, Jetcost, Crocierissime.it, weg.de, and Hotelscan.

Busbud is a travel website specializing in intercity bus tickets.

Jetcost.com is a travel metasearch engine for finding airfares. It acts as an intermediary, and does not directly sell flights or travel products. Since 2013, Jetcost has been a brand of Lastminute.com Group. The site is most popular in Western Europe and the top search words on the site are for Air France, Ryanair, and Transavia.

Booking Holdings Inc. is an American travel technology company incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law and based in Norwalk, Connecticut, that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines including namesake and flagship Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable. It operates websites in about 40 languages and 200 countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hotels.ng</span> Nigerian travel websites

Hotels.ng is a Nigerian online hotels booking agency which was launched in 2013. The platform was founded by Mark Essien who hails from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria and claims to list over 7,138 hotels from 320 cities in Nigeria.

TourRadar is a privately held global company headquartered in Vienna, Austria that operates an online marketplace and internet booking engine, specializing in multi-day tours.

Dayuse.com is a booking platform for microstays based in Paris, with offices in Hong Kong and New York. Created in 2010. The company facilitates the online and telephone booking of daytime booking rooms. The platform collaborates with a network of over 7000 across 25 countries, serving as a intermediary that connects customers with their chosen hotel accommodations.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 O'Neill, Sean (5 February 2014). "You have to pivot to win it: Original social travel site WAYN on survival". Phocuswire.
  2. ↑ "WAYN secures $11 million". www.stellantpartners.com. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
  3. ↑ "WAYN Stock Price, Funding, Valuation, Revenue & Financial Statements". www.cbinsights.com. Retrieved 5 May 2023.
  4. 1 2 "WAYN: About Us" . Retrieved 20 September 2015.
  5. ↑ "Social travel network WAYN marks 22-million registered travellers". Ventureburn. 19 September 2013. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
  6. ↑ Butcher, Mike (21 September 2016). "After a long journey, WAYN gets picked up by its dotcom-era brother, Lastminute.com". TechCrunch. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
  7. ↑ "WAYN travel social network bought by Lastminute.com Group". www.phocuswire.com. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
  8. ↑ "Scaling a successful business session, with Pete Ward". Putney Social.
  9. ↑ Cashmore, Pete (27 November 2006). "WAYN Gets $11M for "MySpace of Travel"". Mashable.
  10. 1 2 "WAYN announces tour offering in tie-up with Viator".
  11. ↑ "Wayn.com signs strategic partnership with Booking.com". Breaking Travel News. 17 November 2014.
  12. ↑ Thuraisingham, Bhavani; Abrol, Satyen; Heatherly, Raymond; Kantarcioglu, Murat; Khadilkar, Vaibhav; Khan, Latifur (6 April 2016). Analyzing and Securing Social Networks. CRC Press. ISBN   978-1-4822-4328-4.
  13. ↑ "Don't go to WAYN.com".
  14. ↑ "Alexa Traffic Ranking for wayn.com". Alexa Internet. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 1 January 2015.
  15. ↑ Coetzee, Jacques (16 April 2013). "WAYN: how a social startup is cashing in on its jet-setting community". VentureBurn. Retrieved 16 April 2013.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.