and tribulations, as well as his foray into the world of entrepreneurship.  His first business idea was for apartments that were tailored to backpackers. This was quite a departure for a person who had a background in corporate law with experience in mergers and acquisitions. “We started that business with around $70,000 in capital, and this apartment business grew into a couple of million [dollars] a year, and we then used the capital to buy more apartments, and soon turned them into corporate apartments,” he said. He sold the apartments around two years later, enjoying quite a windfall thanks to the appreciation in property prices over the years. His next venture was a voucher business much like the Groupon craze at the time, but Schwab soon found out that the real potential of this voucher business lay in the travel component. “We realised pretty quickly that the travel component of the voucher business model had the most legs and made the most sense, a basket size of at least $3,000 made the overall economics a lot better,” he noted. Evolutionary gains It was tough going for Schwab when he started the voucher company back in 2010. The team had no experience setting up a web-based business at the time and had to learn everything from scratch. “We had to learn everything from customer marketing to building websites, product engineering, and we were doing things really by trial and error,” he said. Due to the bootstrapped nature of the startup, the team was constantly ‘back-solving’ problems as they cropped up. “It wasn’t until 2016 where we got a product manager in, and we were still very light in terms of building a structure around our technology team,” he noted. The company has outsourced a lot of its IT work to contractors in Vietnam and Ukraine. Nonetheless, Schwab highlighted the importance of getting a strong engineering team to manage the complexities of a web business. “Getting great engineers is an absolute minimum requirement these days, as well as a head of product design and product managers too. We’ve now got a team who are super entrepreneurial, but it’s taken a long time to get to this point,” he said. Nuances matter Hiring the right people is key. For Schwab, that means getting individuals who have the right mix of technical skills and entrepreneurial swagger. “If you have a great enterprise, with a great product team, they can obviously take what a founder does and improve it, and come up with their own commercial drivers as well,” he said. He values employees who can see the bigger picture, are very clued in to what the customer wants and totally committed to making the customer experience of paramount importance. In terms of the travel business, his company used to thrive on special deals with hotels to get 30 to 40 per cent discounts on holiday packages circa-2019. These two-week promotions used to be a real hit among customers back then, but times have changed. “It’s a different world now, post Covid, we have rebuilt a marketplace, with massively curated experiences, and get inventory pricing on a whole host of services, like tours, cruises, villas, experiences, flights and so on,” he said. There’s a lot of complexity involved, but he is totally committed to creating an incredible user interface with a great user experience. “We want our customers to come to our app or site and create an amazing trip with our planning software for all their needs,” he said. Value-added services Schwab feels that the future for his company lies in the value-added side of things. From getting access to premium lounges in airports to check-in at hotels through an integrated app on your phone, the future is all about integration. “Maybe you are flying economy, and you’ve got three hours to kill. We could get you into an exclusive airline lounge for $60, you could sip champagne for the next three hours,” he said. He sees the company will be morphing into a travel company that puts technology and customer experience at the forefront of what it does. This is where best practices in the hiring process matter. He puts a strong emphasis on getting personnel who can continually improve their product offerings to create new levels of customer experience. “When you go from a startup to a mature business, scaling up is a big challenge, and we have to build bigger squads to work on our personalisation initiatives to remain competitive,” he said. The curated marketplace Luxury Escapes is all about curated travelling experiences. The company contracts a small number of properties in each global destination, and there is always an emphasis on absolute value and great deals for the consumer. “We’ve been able to get half a million run-rate on our sales in a year with virtually zero marketing behind it,” he added. For Schwab, the pandemic has been a blessing in disguise, as the company is now worth three times more than it was pre-pandemic. He has continued to hire new personnel even during the height of the crisis. “We have Shark-tank like programmes internally to get great ideas for our business, and we encourage our employees to try new things and make mistakes along the way. We are always trying to reinvent ourselves,” he said. Ultimately, Schwab feels that as long as the company focuses on creating better products for the demand-driven inspirational travel sector, the company should be positioned for long term success.