"Rural travel may actually exceed urban, for the first time ever": Interview with Stashers CEO Jacob Wedderburn-Day
Summary
However with the current pandemic, we wanted to catch up with their co-founder and CEO Jacob Wedderburn-Day to see how things are fairing in the travel industry, as well as get the chance to hear their tips on how they grew so fast, and what they have planned for the rest of the year. The more we looked into the problem, we realised that storage in cities is a genuine issue, and the station lockers were not equipped to deal with the rising demand from tourism, especially from Airbnb. We’ve been around the longest, which itself isn’t a USP, but it has meant we had first-mover advantage in a lot of territories and locked in some great relationships with big partners, such as Premier Inn, Hotels.com and most recently Marriott Homes and Villas. Cleanliness will be a big theme in accommodation and hotels and vacation rentals will need to make concerted efforts to demonstrate their commitment to sanitation. Outside of accommodation, my personal prediction is that cruises will suffer quite badly and airlines will be really set back by this, but that the assets won’t go to waste, so ultimately it won’t be the end of low-cost flights, but it will be a terrible year for them.