Travel company Jayride hopeful for post-pandemic improvement

Sydney travel marketplace Jayride is remaining hopeful that its pandemic growth strategies will put it in a good position as travellers flock back to airports.

It is now four years since the startup landed on the ASX and its price chart looks about as you would expect from a small-capitalisation travel tech company during a pandemic.

In March 2020, the price of Jayride’s shares dove, wiping off most of its value before bottoming out at around seven cents. Jayride was a long way off its IPO price of 50 cents a share and the situation was dire.

When the government’s JobKeeper program was announced, Jayride took up the offer and helped pay staff to the tune of $171,000 before the end of the 2019-20 financial year.

In the 2020-21 financial year, it took in $478,500 from the government program and started to stabilise.

Constant uncertainty around travel has naturally made the last two years extremely difficult for the company focused on offering airport transfers, but Co-Founder and Managing Director Rod Bishop remains optimistic.

“We are positioned to benefit as travel volumes continue to recover across the US, UK, Asian and Australian markets,” he told shareholders this week.

“We remain focused on executing our growth strategies to capture reopenings and increase market share, and are selectively deploying the proceeds from our capital raise.”

Last July Jayride finalised the second tranche of a $10 million placement, but the cash raised from investors is still flowing freely out of the company that only made $380,000 from its customers in the last quarter.

Jayride posted an operating loss of $647,000 from September through December. But its financial statements note a combined $679,000 loss on its balance was from staff payments and admin costs that were incurred previously during the pandemic and only just paid off following the capital raise.

Bishop said he would continue the company’s expansion strategy in the hopes his customers return to travelling en masse before the remaining $5.5 million from investors runs out.

“We have been successful in recruiting key talent across sales, marketing, product and technology,” he told shareholders. “These new team members will be transformative for us.

“In particular, we are increasing investment inf our expanded traveller offer of new vehicles, service classes and more, including to deploy these into Booking.com and other channels.

“[We are] also introducing further operating enhancements and automation for higher margins and a fundamentally improved traveller experience.”