The co-founder of the online travel portal Destinia.com gave a talk in the Sabadell Hub Empresa, Banco Sabadell‘s virtual training forum for entrepreneurs, which was followed in person and online by 300 people, in which he recounted his exciting life and corporate journey until he founded his current group of companies.
Amuda Goueli was born into a humble family in a country that no longer exists, Nubia. As he explained during his talk, “during my childhood neither I nor my siblings or friends had the luxury of comforts that seem as basic, for example, as shoes. At that time, most people where I was born simply didn’t have them”. His father, however, after fighting alongside the British army in the Second World War – which gave him the opportunity to expand his “vital frontiers” – one day came to a conclusion that would prove to be extremely accurate: to get ahead in life, he had to get his family out of the village. This would be the first of several factors that would change the life of the Goueli family forever.
Relocation to Cairo and an obsession with Don Quixote
They moved to Cairo, where the Goueli brothers, at their parents’ request, combined study and various jobs. Amuda has been doing so since he was nine years old, in places as diverse as a flower shop where he launched his first business initiatives, a stall in a souk, which he now defines as “the Harvard of haggling”, where he learned to classify the people who came to buy at a glance, and a second-hand book stall. There, as he explains, “almost no one came to buy, which helped me to become a bookworm. With so many books at my fingertips and so much free time available, I could only do one thing: read, which quickly became an obsession”. Until one fine day, in a concise history of Latin American literature, he discovered a reference to a book that caught his eye: it was Don Quixote. He soon discovered that in his country it is out of print, and that the only copy available in Cairo was in the library of the Spanish Cultural Institute. But there was a problem: it was in Spanish, a language he did not know. Without hesitation, he signed up for a three-year Spanish course, so that he could finally read it. At the same time, he finished his degree in Industrial Engineering.
Arrival in Spain and launch of 300 websites
His Spanish teachers in Cairo quickly detected in him a growing passion for our language, which led them to grant him one of the two scholarships that were awarded annually to students to get to know Spain. That first visit, in the 1980s, made a deep impression on him. So much so that, in the 1990s, he returned, this time to stay. And he did so at a very special time: with the arrival of internet fever. He was fortunate to be given an old computer, now obsolete, with which he learned to build websites. And at the same time he befriended Ian Webber, a professional musician, who asked him for help to create a website on musical topics. It was his start in the online world.
Shortly after, and partly as a hobby, they began to create other sites on various topics, using books with diverse content, which they could use without infringing copyright. Those first sites began to attract so much traffic that they were soon contacted by an online advertising agency in the United States, asking for permission to include advertising banners on them. Their success was immediate. They begin to receive cheques for such large amounts that they decided to dedicate themselves entirely to creating new websites in Spanish. “We had more than 300,” he recalls, “which we started up in less than a week”. Everything seemed to be working perfectly… until the dot.com crash arrived.
The collapse of the online world and the creation of Destinia
With the debacle of the online world, however, their activity came to a halt overnight. “But we had to eat every day,” he recalls, “and we decided to convert one of those pages, which was about tourism, into a hotel booking portal. It was all very precarious, and not entirely legal, because we lacked some bureaucratic permit to carry out this activity. But, modestly, it began to work. We received requests by phone or e-mail, and then we made the bookings in a travel agency in exchange for a commission”. Destinia was born.
Creative Marketing with “zero budget”
It was essential that the new company make a name for itself and carve a niche in the market. In other words, Destinia needed to start appearing in the media, although there was no budget available for marketing. The solution was to start generating shocking news stories that could grab the attention of journalists in the hope of catching some “briefs”. The first one came after managing to become representatives in Spain and Portugal of a US company that had begun to offer trips to outer space. After achieving this, they launched a press release offering the product to Spanish customers. The success was overwhelming. Overnight, Destinia became a regular presence on TV sets. It was followed by the offer of trips to North Korea, a destination that no agency offered at that time. Another news bombshell. They then offered customers a refund if it rained during their trip, among other similar bombshells. Destinia was becoming consolidated, and there were ever more numerous customers.
Constant innovation in the technological field
From then on, and with the economic resources to invest in marketing and technological developments, the company’s growth has been constant. And it has been marked, among other factors, by a constant desire to lead with the technological changes in the sector at all times. Thus, for example, it was one of the first to launch an online payment platform, fifteen years ago, when this was not yet common. Subsequently, it was also the first to make it possible to pay for its services in cryptocurrencies. It now has its own Artificial Intelligence platform in a testing period, which will allow trips to be bought by written request, leaving the current search engines behind. This new option will also allow the user to personalise their request much more when booking a hotel than is possible now. According to Goueli “The future is Artificial Intelligence. Today’s travel search engines have only a few years left to live”.
60% of its business is already B2B
In fact, its advanced technology has led Destinia to become a company that focuses most of its activity on providing technological support to other tourism companies around the world. Although the general public still regards it as an online travel agency, in fact today it is a multinational with offices in several countries, for which B2B already accounts for 60% of its turnover.
During the talk, reference was also made to the importance of having the support and relationship of a financial institution such as Banco Sabadell capable of responding to the demands of customers such as Destinia, who are often a few years ahead of what is normal in the sector. As happened when the company asked the bank about the need to have an online payment gateway when almost no one had it, or when was requested implementing the service in cryptocurrencies. Two difficult requests at that time, but that they were resolved.
Goueli highlights three factors that have helped him succeed in his spectacular career. The first, the value of education: “We must never stop learning, and even less so today, when we have all the information in the world on our mobile”. The second, the ambition to always go further, “you must never stop dreaming, you must never stop setting new goals”. The third, the need for companies to contribute positive things to society, “Destinia has, for some years now, several orphanages in various countries around the world, as well as a home for women victims of abuse, and we have recently opened centres that facilitate entrepreneurship for young people in developing countries. This, ultimately, is profitable. Because when you manage projects like this, it provides you with a much greater push to move forward at times than your own company. Because if you think about how you’re helping those people, you know you can’t afford to fail, because of what it would mean for those projects”.
