Santé
sante.travel

TL;DR — Investor overview

We aggregate high-value sports travel communities and monetise their travel, identity, and purchasing behaviour.

As an activity-first travel platform we build for cyclists, surfers, skiers, runners and anyone who travels for activities.

There's no good platform for this. We're building it. We're raising a seed round to fund the first 12 months of product build, supply seeding, and user testing — and we're looking for investors who believe in the problem.

Raise target£250,000
StructureSeed Round
Runway12 months
Tax reliefSEIS eligible
Seed Round·SEIS Eligible

We're building the platform that activity travel users deserve.

There are millions of cyclists, surfers, skiers and trail runners booking travel on generic platforms right now — scattered across Airbnb, Booking.com, and Google. No platform speaks to them as a tribe. Santé is that platform — a media engine that aggregates these communities, earns their trust, and monetises their travel, identity, and purchasing behaviour.

We're raising a seed round to build the product, seed the supply, and get early users to use it for inspiration and booking.

[This is not Booking.com with a sports filter.]

SEIS EligibleUK Tax Relief

Put in £10,000.
Risk as little as £2,750.

Santé qualifies for the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme — one of the most generous early-stage investment reliefs in the world.

1

50% back as income tax relief

Invest £10,000 and you get £5,000 back on your tax bill — immediately, via self-assessment.

2

Loss relief if things go wrong

If the company fails, you can offset further losses against income tax. In the worst case, a higher-rate taxpayer loses around 30p per pound invested.

3

100% CGT-free if it works

Any gain you make on the shares — none of it is subject to capital gains tax.

SEIS relief is subject to individual tax position and HMRC approval. Maximum £200,000 per investor per tax year. This is illustrative — please consult a tax adviser.

SEIS Calculator

£
You invest£10,000
SEIS income tax relief (50%)£5,000
Your real cost£5,000
Loss relief if company fails (40%)£2,000
Worst-case loss

if the company fails entirely

£3,000

30p per £1 invested

If it goes wellGains are 100% CGT-free

The problem

Santé

None of these are connected. The booking friction is real, and the miss rate is high.

Activity travel is a large and growing market, almost entirely served by platforms that treat sport as a tag, not a context.

The opportunity

We want to be a better option than AirBnB/Booking.com for the active traveller.

The athlete who travels for sport — a ski trip, a cycling camp, a surf week — is already spending the money. They're already booking accommodation. They're just doing it through a platform that doesn't understand them.

If we build something they genuinely prefer — and if that preference translates to bookings (potentially more bookings per person) — that's the business. We're not creating demand. We're capturing existing demand, turning it up, and serving it better.

The intent layer

Santé isn't a listings page — it's a gathering point.

Members see live conditions, key moments, join communities and their trips, book fast or build a group around them.

sante.travel/cycling

11 of 11

IntermediateFrance

Best road cycling base near long climbs

"Best climbing week of my year"

BeginnerSpain

Girona gravel camp for women

"Finally found my people on a bike"

AdvancedSpain

Mallorca spring training block

"My FTP jumped 20 watts after this camp"

IntermediateItaly

Dolomites sportive preparation

"Every climb is a postcard"

The Platform

Three sides of one marketplace

The activity travel market already uses Online Travel Agents. They just don't serve it well. Santé is built for the people OTAs treat as generic tourists.

For Athletes

Find the right place. Know when to go. Connect with your people.

Right now, a cyclist scrolls Instagram passively being influenced by cyclists they follow. Eventually, three years later, they decide to make that trip. They use Airbnb, a weather app, Strava, blogs. Santé puts that in one place — with properties curated by a team that know what you want and only send you to properties that get what you do.

The product is one better system for what athletes are already doing across five platforms.

For Properties

Reach guests who really want to be there.

A farmhouse near a famous cycling climb is the perfect spot for a Santé cyclist, but they might not find it among thousands of options worldwide. People planning around their sport often stay longer, engage more, spend more, and come back. They also bring friends, clubs and followers — and create organic content to encourage others into the same trip.

Santé gives properties a channel that OTAs can't offer: relevance to the specific community around them.

For Creators

Turn content you're already making into a revenue stream.

Athletes with followings already film where they stay, reference the properties they used, tell people what it was like. On Santé, those recommendations can turn into a commission — without changing what they create or who they are. Creators stand to earn more from their content, receive more stay offers and increased demand for brand partnerships.

The creator angle isn't a growth hack. It's aligning the incentives of people who are already doing the marketing.

The loop we're betting on: better properties and high trust bring activity-focused travellers, their stays and content bring others, and athletes and influencers drive interest in the best and newest destinations.

The flywheel

The Opportunity

The market exists. It's just underserved.

We're not creating demand. Activity travel is a large, growing market — and the people in it are already spending money. They just don't have a platform built for them.

Proven

The demand is real, not speculative

Activity travel is one of the fastest-growing segments in global tourism. Athletes are already spending serious money on trips. We're capturing a market, not creating one.

Fragmented

A typical trip takes hours — sometimes months — to plan

Forecast apps, property platforms, event calendars, route planners — none of them connected. The friction is real. Nobody has fixed it yet.

Time-critical

Activity travel runs on hard constraints

Weather windows, ballot deadlines, seasonal access. Generic booking platforms treat a ski week in March like a city break. Athletes don't have that luxury.

Context-blind

The properties already exist on Airbnb and Booking.com

A farmhouse next to a famous cycling climb looks identical to one in open countryside. The supply is there. The context isn't.

The fragmentation problem

Planning a week of surfing in Portugal takes 3 hours and 5 apps.

That friction is the opportunity. Nobody has built the unified layer yet — not because it's technically hard, but because no one has gone deep enough on a specific community to earn the trust needed to pull it off.

Need

Current solution

Gap

Find a property

Airbnb / Booking.com

No activity context

Check conditions

Forecast apps

No booking integration

See what's on

Event sites, Google, etc.

No accommodation link

Find community

Strava, Instagram, Discord

No property discovery

Find routes nearby

Komoot, Strava

No trip planning layer

Santé → one platform for all five

The core bet

We don't need a large share of the travel market. We need to be the obvious choice for a specific, high-value segment that currently has no good option. If we build something they genuinely prefer — and build the community around it — the repeat bookings follow naturally. That's the hypothesis.

For property owners

A better channel for activity properties

If your property is near a surf break, a famous climb, or a ski resort — you already have activity travellers staying with you. Santé is a channel that finds more of them, and guides them in when they aren't actively looking for you.

The right guests

  • Athletes who book around sport are purposeful — they're more likely to be positive reviewers, because we know they're getting what they came for

  • Activity travellers tend to book longer stays: a cycling trip to Mallorca is a week, not a weekend

  • Guests who found you because of what's nearby are more likely to leave reviews that help the next athlete find you

Organic marketing you don't pay for

  • Athletes post about where they stay. A property near Sa Calobra gets tagged in cycling posts whether it's on Santé or not

  • The difference: when it's on Santé, those posts lead somewhere — and the people clicking are already activity travellers

  • We're building the infrastructure to connect that content to bookings — which benefits properties without them doing anything extra

A channel Airbnb doesn't offer

  • Airbnb treats a farmhouse next to a famous climb the same as every other rural rental — there's no way to signal what makes it special to the right people

  • On Santé, that property appears in searches for that activity, in event-adjacent results, and in community feeds from athletes who've been there

  • We charge 12% commission — competitive with Airbnb, but the channel is meaningfully different

What we're looking for in beta properties

We're curating the first 100 properties to feature on Santé. They need to be near genuine activity destinations — not just rural, but specifically relevant to a sport. We'll only list places that hit our Standard — places we'd book ourselves.

  • Within reach of a known cycling, surfing, skiing, or trail running location

  • Owner engaged — we need hosts who understand the kind of guests we're sending

  • Genuinely good: interesting, well-equipped for sport, not just another rental

The Plan

What we're testing, and how long it takes

We're not going to know if this works in 90 days. Activity travel is seasonal, and building genuine booking habits takes time. Here's what we're actually trying to learn.

Phase 1

Ship something realMonths 1–6

The goal is a working product with real properties and real users — not a polished demo.

Phase 2

Measure what mattersMonths 6–12

Initially we care if people use the platform, then we want them to book once, then we want them to keep using the platform and ultimately book again.

Phase 3

Build the case for Series AYear 2

We need cohort data — not 60-day snapshots. Activity travel is seasonal. A year of data tells you something meaningful.

The honest version of the thesis

There are millions of people booking activity travel through OTAs right now — hotels, campsites, rentals — not because it's good for them, but because there's nothing built for them. We're not trying to out-convert Booking.com or Airbnb. We're trying to build something that a specific slice of their users actually prefers — and measure whether, over time, those users come back more.

Use of funds

How we'll use your investment

This raise is to get us through the first 12 months — build the product, seed the supply, recruit the first cohort, and learn what actually works.

Seed Round

£250,000

12-month runway · product + seed phase

35%

Product

Engineering — the platform needs to be genuinely good, not just functional. Search, booking flow, event integrations, real-time conditions, community feed.

We can't ask athletes to switch from five working apps to one bad one. The product has to earn it.

46%

Operations

Core team costs, legal and payment processing setup, hosting and infrastructure. Kept lean — this raise is for building and testing, not scaling.

We're not hiring for scale. We're staying small enough to move fast and respond to what we learn.

12%

Property recruitment

This could be done remotely. But we need to make a real impact with the owners of the best properties to fill the first 30 spots on Santé.

Supply quality is the first thing athletes will judge. A platform of average properties is just another OTA.

7%

Athlete acquisition

No paid ads in the first phase — that's not how this community works. Direct outreach to cycling clubs, surf schools, running communities. Test paid later once we know what converts.

Acquiring the wrong first cohort is worse than acquiring fewer users. We need athletes who will tell us what's broken.

Product 35%
Operations 46%
Properties 12%
Acquisition 7%

What this raise is not for

We're not scaling. We're not running national ad campaigns. We're not hiring a team of 15. This is runway to build something real, get it in front of the right people, and raise the next round with conviction. The people in this round are getting in at the beginning — before the product launches, before the community grows, before anyone else has the chance. That's where the real upside is.

Speculative

Want to see some guesses?

We said we wouldn't do hockey-stick projections. We meant it. What follows are not forecasts — they're illustrative numbers based on a few honest assumptions. Treat them as a sanity check on the model, not a promise.

With that caveat firmly in place, here's what happens if things go roughly to plan.

The CAC advantage

The platform is the marketing.

Using Santé is free. People browse routes, save trips, read guides, follow properties — and that's how they discover the accommodation and experiences they eventually book. The discovery happens inside the product. We don't pay for it.

There is a CAC — we don't know exactly what it will be yet, but we expect it to be quite low. Once someone is on the platform, converting them from browser to booker costs near zero. The product does that work.

We're addressing 15+ sports categories with 10,000–100,000 engaged users per category. At 1–2% booking conversion, each booker generates roughly £2,500 in annual GMV and ~£1,500–1,800 in LTV to Santé over a 5-year lifetime. Reaching 1 million platform users costs an estimated £5–10M in acquisition spend — generating 10,000–20,000 active bookers and a structurally different unit economics to most travel businesses.

we think we can 10x this...

Sports categories

15+

Users per category

10k–100k

Platform CAC

~£5–10/user

In-platform conversion cost

Near zero

Booking conversion

1–2%

Avg. annual GMV per booker

~£2,500

Est. booker lifetime

5+ years

Est. LTV per booker

~£1,500–1,800

Revenue model

What the numbers might look like

Scenario
High scenario — strong traction, flywheel fires early

Accommodation

~£51.8M

15,000 properties listed

~300,000 total

6 nights avg stay · £240 ADR

12% commission

Partnerships

~£20M

Global category sponsorships + destination exclusives

Gear brands, destinations, nutrition, insurance

Add-ons

~£6M

8–12% of add-on spend

Private chefs · guides · transfers · massage · bike hire · sports photographers

Total (illustrative)

~£77.8M

Revenue from ~1,500,000 platform users, 15,000 listed properties. All numbers are indicative guesses.

if we sold the business at year 10...

at ~10x revenue, the business is worth ~£778M.

your 0.4% stake (net £5k after SEIS) is worth ~£3,110,000.

a net £5k bet that became £3.1M. the high scenario. treat with appropriate caution.

The flywheel

Clubs, influencers and event organisers become distribution.

Anyone who drives bookings — a cycling club, a triathlon coach, a trail running event organiser, a fitness influencer — earns a percentage of every booking they refer. Their incentive is to promote Santé. Our acquisition cost stays near zero.

A cycling club with 500 members that drives 50 bookings in a year would earn roughly £1,500–£3,000 in affiliate fees. That's meaningful money to a club treasurer — and it compounds as their community grows.

Cycling or running club

£1,500–£3,000/yr

500 members · 50 bookings/year

Funds kit, events, or club trips

Fitness influencer or coach

£4,500–£9,000/yr

20k followers · 150 bookings/year

A meaningful recurring income line

Event organiser

£6,000–£12,000/yr

Annual race or camp · 200+ attendees booking stays

Adds a revenue stream to the event itself

Affiliate rate illustratively assumed at 3–5% of booking value. The point isn't the exact number — it's that these people have a genuine reason to send us traffic.

Partnerships

Sponsored category pages

£500–£2,000/mo

Gear brands, apparel, nutrition

Castelli sponsors the cycling page. Patagonia sponsors surf.

Curated listing sponsorship

£150–£350/mo

Properties and hosts

"Editor's Pick" featured placement in curated destination pages.

Newsletter sponsorship

£250–£750/edition

Brands, events, experiences

Sponsor slot in activity-specific newsletters to engaged subscribers.

Event & camp promotion

£300–£1,000/event

Race organisers, camp hosts

Featured placement for a triathlon, cycling sportive, or ski camp.

Destination & tourism boards

£2,000–£6,000/deal

Regional tourism bodies

Curated destination content with co-branded editorial coverage.

Club & community packages

£50–£150/mo

Sports clubs, community orgs

Premium tools — group booking pages, branded profile, priority placement.

Ancillary spend

Activity guides

£15–£45/booking

Cycling guides, surf instructors, mountain leaders

Booked through Santé alongside the stay. 10–15% commission on guide fees.

Gear & kit rental

£8–£25/booking

Bike hire, ski hire, wetsuit rental

Pre-trip rental booked at the same time as accommodation.

Travel & activity insurance

£15–£40/policy

Specialist insurers

Referral commission on policies suited to active travellers.

Private chefs & catering

10–12% commission

In-villa chefs, group caterers

Post-ride dinners, altitude kitchens, race-week group catering.

Transfers & logistics

10% commission

Airport shuttles, trail transfers, bike transport

The last friction point for an active trip — we solve it at booking.

Additional revenue streams

Accommodation is the anchor. Everything else follows — and it adds up.

When someone books a cycling villa in Mallorca through Santé, they also need a guide for the mountain stages, bike hire, an airport transfer, and possibly a chef for the group. Each of those is a commission opportunity — created entirely by the accommodation booking we already made.

Alongside that, gear brands, nutrition companies, destination boards, and event organisers all want to reach the active traveller. A high-intent, sport-specific audience is genuinely valuable — and ours will be purpose-built for it. Partnerships aren't an afterthought; they're a structural income layer that scales with the platform.

Combined, these two streams represent a substantial additional revenue layer on top of accommodation commission — and they compound as the user base grows.

Illustrative scale — Year 3 base

Partnerships

5 category page sponsors @ £1,000/mo avg£60,000
25 featured listings @ £220/mo avg£66,000
3 newsletter sponsors × 24 editions£36,000
40 event placements @ £600 avg£24,000
5 destination board retainers£20,000
30 club community packages @ £100/mo£36,000
Partnerships subtotal~£242,000

Ancillary spend

600 guided days @ £25 avg commission£15,000
800 gear rentals @ £15 avg commission£12,000
1,000 insurance referrals @ £25 avg£25,000
300 chef/catering bookings @ £45 avg£13,500
900 transfers @ £12 avg commission£10,800
Ancillary subtotal~£76,000
Total additional revenue~£318,000/yr

All figures illustrative. These sit on top of accommodation commission — not instead of it.

These are illustrative numbers. They assume things go reasonably well, which they may not. They don't account for operational costs, refunds, market conditions, or the general chaos of building a business. What they do show is that the model has multiple logical revenue levers — and that none of them require us to do anything implausible. We don't need to become Airbnb. We need to be very good for a specific type of traveller, and build the infrastructure around that.

The ask

We're looking for people who believe in the problem, not just the projections.

This is a seed round. We're not offering a deck full of hockey-stick projections. We're offering a clear hypothesis, an honest plan to test it, and a team that will tell you what's working and what isn't.

aj@santelife.uk · This page is not indexed by search engines.