Welcome to Whosintown - Where Business Travellers Connect

We were very kindly invited by the charming people at Mashupevent to present to a select audience of industry specialists, observers and investors at NESTA in London. The idea was to get the salient points of your business presentation across in 3 minutes max and my goodness, Tony Fish is very efficient at making sure folks stick to their allotted 3 minutes. You can see my co-founder David Henderson strutting his stuff here. This polished presentation only possible through hours of rehearsals in the pub the night before: I think the regulars thought David was trying out for the local am dram club.

Before and after the presentation side of things we had a booth (actually a smallish table)  from which to demonstrate our wares. Myself and David were really pleased at not only the turnout for the event but how interested everyone was (or at least, politely appeared to be) in the Whosintown concept of smarter business travel and of course greener travel. A number of people thought we did the same things as others in the business networking space and whilst that’s true, more attendees were able to see that we’re quite different in so far as we really aim not just at business folk but business folk who travel a lot and who want to meet like minded people on their travels.  In case you didn’t know, you can do this by sharing travel plans on your Whosintown profile. If you’re ever invited or are thinking of going to  Mashupevent, you must: good fun with good people and the chance to meet with people who might use your ideas, might give you ideas of course potential investors. Off the back of this event we’ve got meetings with 3 possible investment partners, so it can’t be bad. As we’re pre funded, any opportunity to mingle with the great and the good of the VC Funding or angel investor world is very welcome. So, there you go, a very pleasant half day’s event, good fun AND really good wine and canapes to finish off with too!!

Andrew Montgomery, Co-Founder Whosintown.

So now that Whosintown has launched, I thought we should share some background info on the co-founders - myself, Paul Stanyer and Andrew Montgomery. Monty and I are both Scots who grew up in Glasgow. Fate brought us together 25 years ago selling Financial Services for a Dutch Bank but we quickly realised we had a similar desire to affect our own destinies by spotting and trying to plug a a gap in the US woollen market for Scottish Cashmere garments. Unfortunately after an unsolicited approach, the ageing owners of the rather well known woollen company didn’t quite buy into our youthful exuberance and that closed that avenue! Monty re-built and then sold the family engineering business and moved to Manchester which he has used as a base to launch a handful of successful Internet companies. I spent most of the 80’s in the Travel Industry living and working in The Alps and Greece before completely diversifying into a career in Telecoms throughout the 90’s as Global Account Director within the Finance sector of the C&W Group. Enter Paul - he and I worked together in the Greek Isles late 80’s and whilst I moved into Corporate land circa ‘89 Paul continued to develop a very successful career spanning the 90’s driving overseas Sales, Marketing & Operational programes for some of the UK’s premier Travel Companies. Despite pursuing our individual aspirations throughout the 90’s we stayed in contact and met up the next century when I introduced Paul to Monty around 2003. Paul was now a very successful entrepreneur having launched both Holiday Taxis & Business Taxis, from zero to hero and Monty was growing his Pack-Net Internet business amongst others. Meanwhile I was chasing the elusive IPO with numerous Global start-up ventures. We had a few beers, figured we all had similar experiences whilst globetrotting, created Whosintown to solve the pain for Road-Warriors and the rest is history. Serendipity brought us together, we do not intend to waste this huge oportunity - come and join us! David

I decided to get involved with Whosintown because, from experience, I know that business travelling can be a lonely and frustrating life. I have spent a lot of time travelling with my other business Holiday Taxis over the last 5 years and a tool like Whosintown would have been a big help to me. It might not have meant more business but it would certainly have allowed me to set up more meetings whilst travelling. We think that the new service will reduce the amount of dead-time spent on business trips and will increase the number of face-to-face meetings possible in one journey. I’ll definitely be linking to Whosintown from my latest venture, Business Taxis.
Along with my co-founders we think we’ve created a site which will make planning business travel easier and more enjoyable. The site is currently in Beta and I’m pretty sure there are a lot of improvements we can make to the site both in terms of looks and ease of use. We welcome your comments on what we’re doing and if you want to see extra features or functionality, please let us know and we’ll see what we can do to include.

Paul Stanyer co-founder Whosintown and CEO Holiday Taxis