This is a guest post by James Street, co-founder of My Destination.
My Destination has come a long way since its inception back in 2006. Headquartered in London and Marbella, our franchise community now spans 5 continents, 58 countries, and 118 destinations. However, while we have expanded quickly, there are of course some key territories where we are still looking for the right local expert to operate one of our sites.
As we look to accelerate our growth, we have decided to introduce a Money Back Guarantee on our franchises. If for any reason you are not happy with the results and would like to discontinue after one year of operation, then we will give you back your full franchise fee with no strings attached. This is how confident we are in our product and where we are taking the My Destination brand.
So why are we doing this? First and foremost, we are an online travel guide. As such, we want to be able to offer information on every major travel destination in the world. So, for us, the biggest motivation behind the Money Back Guarantee is to find the final pieces to the puzzle and have a complete network.
One of the biggest worries for any new business owner is the risk involved in starting a new business. You not only have to deal with the questions in your own head, but you will also get a lot of people telling you that it is too risky — often those who are closest to you are the ones most putting you off (I know!). Our Money Back Guarantee allows more people to take a bit of a leap of faith without the worry that they will lose this investment because in a year from having launched their site, if we do not meet expectations, we will give them the franchise fee back.
An online franchise is certainly not your traditional bricks and mortar franchise and is often seen as being riskier, even though we are in three very fast growing markets: online marketing, the Internet, and travel. It is also difficult for us to build trust when, geographically, it is not easy for us to meet franchisees all over the globe and talk them through the process face to face.
Franchising in itself offers people a safer alternative to starting a new business because you are buying a proven business model. This is our way of taking it one step further and really standing behind our brand to hopefully instill some trust.
Over the past 5 years, we have had very few people leave the network — and this was them operating on a site which doesn’t have half the tools we have today. It is our mission to make it easy for our franchisees to operate their business and make money, and the plans we have in the immediate future make us more confident than ever to put this guarantee in place.
We are very happy with how far we have come, but are certainly not satisfied until we see ourselves as the number one name in travel.
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