Have you made plans to go to dinner tonight and don't know which restaurant to choose? Do you fancy an impromptu weekend getaway with no defined destination? Thinking of visiting a European capital but without time to prepare the trip? Anyone who answers these questions positively and also has a tight budget can find in Flappin a solution to enjoy packaged leisure proposals where the client doesn't have to worry about anything and with the surprise factor as an additional incentive to round off the experience.
Founded in Barcelona five months ago, Flappin wants to extend the surprise travel business to other categories, an emerging market niche where companies like Waynabox, Flykube, Wonderbox, Drumwit, or Wish & Fly operate. In addition to offering flight plus hotel packages to surprise destinations, Flappin also markets getaways less than three hours from the place of residence, dinners and meals in restaurants, and other types of surprise leisure experiences that can take you to a spa or to do rafting, canyoning, kayaking, paragliding, horseback riding or quad excursions, or a helicopter flight.
Flappin was born with a capital of 60,000 euros contributed by four partners and has now just closed a pre-seed round of 160,000 euros that will allow it to expand the development team, increase the product offering towards new categories, and expand throughout the Spanish market. The idea is to be able to start internationalization at the end of 2022 by making the leap to a European country. To execute this second phase of expansion, Flappin plans to open a seed capital round at the end of the year, for an amount yet to be determined. The startup already has a team of ten people and plans to hire five more in the coming months.
The founding partners of Flappin are Pol Clavell and Marc Teixidor, who serve as CEOs; Sergi Vila, who holds the presidency, and Ferran García, who is the chief operating officer (COO). Both Clavell and Vila have experience in the surprise travel sector, as they had worked at FlyKube, a startup also based in Barcelona. Specifically, Vila was the CEO and co-founder of the firm, while Clavell was the marketing director (CMO).
In the 160,000 euro pre-seed round, business angels and Bcombinator, a digital business incubator and investment fund led by entrepreneur Erik Brieva, have invested. Brieva was a founding partner of iSoco and Polymita Technologies, a company that Red Hat (part of the IBM group) acquired in 2012. Currently, in addition to chairing Bcombinator, Brieva is the CEO of Strands, a fintech of advanced digital banking solutions that was sold to the Italian company Crif in the midst of the pandemic.
The president and partner of Flappin, Sergi Vila, is the CEO of Bcombinator, which recently launched a 10 million fund to invest in early-stage startups.
According to Pol Clavell, since its inception, Flappin has registered a monthly growth of 30% and the goal for the first year is to generate one million euros in revenue. "Our challenge is to apply the concept of surprise to other verticals and develop a platform that integrates both surprise trips and all kinds of leisure experiences," Clavell explains to The New Barcelona Post.
The company is especially aimed at younger generations, travelers with a small budget, and all those people who do not want or do not have time to plan a trip, that is, want to avoid having to search for tickets, hotels, or having to select from thousands of leisure proposals. "There is a lot of over-information and we want to reduce all this stress; at Flappin, in two minutes you can make your request and we take care of everything," he explains. According to the entrepreneur, in addition to this client profile that does not want to plan or complicate their life, the user who "seeks different experiences and enjoys the excitement of the surprise factor" stands out.
When booking a trip, an experience, or a dinner, you have to pay in advance and, in addition to indicating the date, you can set some criteria or preferences and indicate, for example, which cities you do not want to visit. Once the request is received and depending on the budget, the Flappin team takes care of finding the best offers and communicates the destination to the client two days before the start of the trip. If a restaurant has been booked, the name and address are announced via Whatsapp two hours in advance.
According to Clavell, the average price of trips for two people to European cities is around 420 euros, that of getaways is 120 euros, and that of gastronomic reservations is about 70 euros. Flappin already has agreements with a hundred restaurants of all types of cuisine styles in Barcelona and Madrid, collaborates with ten airlines, and adds about 200 destinations, 20 of them in Europe. As is usual in this business segment, Flappin also offers gift packages, in different formats, such as surprise boxes or surprise cards.