How keeping faith with dotcoms paid off
By
Senior Writer
Jody Clarke
Jan 22, 2008
If there was one thing Anthony Collins, 36, wasn’t going to do when he left O’Connell’s Christian Brothers School Dublin in 1988 it was follow his father into the travel business.
Tony Senior headed up a successful tour operator, but the long hours didn’t appeal to his 17-year-old son, who was more interested in art and design than the endless paperwork that came with working at the family business. “So I said I’m going to go off on a completely different path.”
He studied Visual Communication Design at college and by 1995 was running his own graphic design business from a basement office on Dublin’s Mount Street, designing corporate logos and annual reports for the likes of IBM. Then, as the tech boom took off, people started to talk to him about web design. It was a good time to be in the internet industry – “people were getting major capital funding left, right and centre”.
Seeing the money flooding into the sector got him thinking about setting up his own site. Inevitably, his thoughts turned to the family business. At the time, Ryanair, Lastminute and Ebookers were all making a splash online. Collins spotted an opportunity to “take what Tony, my dad, knew about the travel business and combine it with what I knew about the internet”.
In 2000, just 20% of the Irish population was online – but of those who were skiing fans, almost 100% were on the internet. So getting them to book their holidays online seemed the perfect fit. Better yet, it gave him access to the British market without having to “print a million brochures”.
An old friend developed an application that would allow people to book holidays online, while his father invested £1m, some of which they used to develop a business plan with accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers. But then, “in April 2000, the arse fell out of the market”. Everything that had attracted them online, the availability of venture capital funding and the success of other travel sites, vanished as the tech boom turned to bust.
But they kept faith with the idea – and luckily, by the time they launched in October 2000, there had been so much doom and gloom about the tech bubble that the press were hunting for a good news story. Collins had hired a PR firm, who said they could probably get a few people around for lunch to discuss the site. “So we booked a room down in the Morrison hotel, on the Liffey, and about 30 people showed up. We were shocked that this level of interest existed.” The next day they were on the front of the Irish Times Business section, and within a fortnight, they were everywhere.
Even so, he says, sales in the first year of e800,000 were not outstanding. But by 2003, he was doing e3m, and with venture capital funding bought a Belfast travel firm, which helped double the size of the business. Collins is set to carry 30,000 passengers this year, while turnover is forecast at around e40m. He is still growing his operations on an industrial estate outside Dublin city centre and is nothing if not ambitious. “It’s lacking in a bit of atmosphere, but it’s beside Ebay and Ask.com, which is not a bad place to be – it kind of reminds you of where you should be heading.”
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Jody Clarke
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