Marcus Richards
Planning, organising and booking travel is unnecessarily complex, stressful and time-consuming. Fether makes it easy, stress-free, and quick.
Fether is a travel app that uses AI to give you the perfect holiday based on everyone’s preferences. Its in-app-features allow you to book and plan everything in one place, in one app.
Tell us about yourself.
I grew up travelling around the world, going to boarding school, meeting people from all sorts of countries and backgrounds.
But having friends from all over the world, then working all over the place, proved quite difficult to meet up with people — loads of different group chats, people receiving different amounts of information, etc. I knew this wasn’t just a me problem, but a global one. I wanted to create a solution, and Fether is exactly that.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Start with a smaller niche. Something really minute. Then carve it out to be something much bigger and more complex.
Tackling the stress and complexity of going on holiday is actually a huge thing to set out and do, and I didn’t realise just how big until much later in my journey as the founder.
What problem does your business solve?
Planning, booking, organising, discussing, and choosing travel options are incredibly stressful and overwhelming. We found that 80% of people who want to go on holiday often don’t even have a concrete destination or plan of action in mind when they begin planning their next holiday.
Fether changes this. It simplifies the whole process by asking you and the people you’re travelling with three questions: when, where, and why.
Fether then takes the answers to these questions and uses its unique AI to give you the best holiday options—everyone you want to travel with has their preferences taken into account.
So, if you want a relaxing spa in the desert but your friend wants to drive a quad bike up a mountain, Fether will find somewhere for you to stay and go to, so you all get the holiday you want.
Then, with the in-app group chat and voting system, everyone can voice their thoughts. If someone pays for the flights, the in-app bill splitter lets everyone know how much they owe others. You can even select who is sharing a room with who!
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Everyone loves to travel. Everyone loves going on vacation. But no one loves to plan or book it, and with good reason.
We wanted to make the fun and excitement of going on vacation part of the planning of a holiday. That’s why our motto is “live, don’t plan” — Fether lets you get back to the good parts of travelling.
What is your magic sauce?
There are so many travel apps out there, we know. But there is something that they all lack.
You can only do one thing at a time with most travel apps. Airbnb, for example, is great—book your accommodation. Skyscanner is fantastic for seeing all of your flight options in one place.
Splitwise, perfect. See how much you owe to whom. Create a Whatsapp group, ideal. Let’s all chat about the holiday with that. But that’s it. That’s all they do. They do one thing at a time, and that’s where their usefulness ends. You need a whole folder labelled “travel apps” on your phone to plan a holiday.
That’s what Fether solves. You don’t need 15 apps that all do individual things; you only need one – and it’s Fether.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Fether’s AI and other features can be used not just for holidays, but for anything that requires group input, planning, and booking. This could include a range of things, from weddings to work events, alumni meet-ups or conferences.
Now, we’re looking to be a B2B business – we think companies could hugely benefit from Fether’s features. Huge numbers of the UK working population now work either fully remotely or with flexible work options.
We think companies could use Fether to track their workforce’s work preferences, where they work, or if they need to send groups of employees abroad, they can track every aspect of the trip with the Fether app.
It seems that the options only grow every day!
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
COVID. When COVID hit, as with any business, it was really hard to see how Fether could grow or change to adapt to how the world had suddenly changed – that change being that travel just hadn’t happened for nearly two years.
But this time proved to be a blessing. We worked on the app so that it was ready for its first beta test by Christmas 2021, which proved to be very successful.
We figured out that we wanted to host events, conferences, work with travel influencers to help them get back to travelling, change our approach to social media and much more. We learnt what we had to do to change and grow to make the app ever better—that’s the version of the app that is out now.
Covid really showed us that setbacks can be pushed forward with the right mentality.
How do people get involved in or buy into your vision?
Right now, we’re looking for investment. We’ve got a solid vision of where we want our app to be and how it will only grow in the future.
But that takes our time and investment money. I want to be able to give my team, who have been working non-stop, a good salary, work on our marketing campaigns and make the app better and better with every second.
Or, if you work in travel, we want to know how you see the sector changing and how Fether will fit in, because to me, Fether is the future of travel.
