We back the purposeful.
We are pleased to announce our investment in Checkfront. We welcome Jason Morehouse, Grant Jurgeneit, Mark Holder, Chris McGuire and the team!
Consumption in North America, and around the world, is increasingly focused on experiences. In fact, travel and activities are the fastest growing segment in the travel industry with over $183B spent world-wide last year and $34B spent in the US alone (trailing only airlines and hotels in total travel spend).
While today’s travellers are more willing than ever to pay for unique and delightful experiences, the expectation for quality service has never been higher. A poor experience by a traveller is now often followed by a poor review or a nasty tweet, often to devastating effects. 50% of all online bookings are made once a traveller is in-destination, often on smartphones, with travellers quickly comparing and contrasting different operators as they book their activities only a day or two in advance.
While an increasingly affluent market expects more from their travel experiences, the tours and operators offering these experiences have not kept up. 40% of operators worldwide still do not allow for online bookings and most cannot check their inventory in real-time. The consumer experience suffers.
Located in Victoria BC, Checkfront is a leading software platform already powering travel and activity operators at scale. With almost 5000 operators on the platform, Checkfront runs the digital experience of millions of activities each year.
With a focus on a flexible, easy-to-use architecture, Checkfront empowers every travel operator with an unparalleled digital experience, delighting their consumers all along the activity journey. From marketing and bookings, to waiver and inventory management, to review surveys and channel management, Checkfront makes running a travel and activity business easier. The Checkfront platform is capable of powering the smallest tour operators to the most complicated, multi-location franchises who want to build a custom experience on top of Checkfront’s open API-based architecture. Every day, operators rely on Checkfront to run their businesses—ranging from the Jaguar Land Rover Experience to the trendy axe throwing businesses that seem to be popping up in every North American city.
Checkfront’s extensibility includes third-party integrations. Currently supporting more than 50 software applications, Checkfront acts like an OS, allowing operators to choose the best-of-breed integrations to run and help grow their business. Integrations include payment processors, accounting software, channel management and marketing/CRM integrations, and many more.
Checkfront is also the only software platform to offer both commission-based or subscription-based pricing, providing operators with lots of flexibility to choose the pricing plan that works best for them.
And as much as Checkfront is already capable of, FRAMEWORK thinks that Checkfront can do even more. Already a trusted partner to help run an operator’s business, we believe that tighter integrations with financial services applications can allow Checkfront to deliver an even more compelling solution to both the operators and their consumers.
Look out for advancements in this area in the coming months!
This is a team that has the vision, domain expertise, and the technical chops to achieve great things, and we can’t wait to see what this team can accomplish.