nomad.me
The world’s first subscription-based travel booking site is scaling quickly, thanks in part to RingCentral
While many businesses claim to be revolutionizing their industry, nomad.me is actually doing it. The company created the world’s first membership-based travel booking site. For an annual fee of a few hundred dollars, members gain access to exclusive, nonpublic deals—often far better than those available to the travel-booking public—on flights, hotels, cruises, car rentals, and other travel services around the world.
The membership model allows nomad.me to fund its operations entirely through subscription fees—and offer its exclusive deals at zero markup and zero commission. And because the service operates as a closed user group, nomad.me can connect members with deals that travel brands would never allow presented to the public. As Chief Operating Officer Sarah Abbott says, the company helps you find “the best rates on hotels you know, at prices they wish you didn’t.”
Today, nomad.me is one of the fastest-growing travel booking sites in the industry, offering its members easy online access to deals on nearly 2 million hotels, exclusive resorts, all the major global airlines as well as more than 130 low-cost carriers, and other travel providers worldwide.
The remote organization needed a cloud-based communications platform
When they opened their Los Angeles headquarters in 2020, the founding team wasn’t expecting to build nomad.me as a remote company.
But as the lockdowns went into place, they realized that to keep operations growing, they would need to prepare for a workforce that wasn’t reporting to an office. That made finding the right communications solution even more important.
RingCentral proves a trusted partner from day one
As Sarah explains, she researched the major cloud-communications vendors, and for several reasons RingCentral topped her list.
“I had already spoken with a trusted colleague who raved about RingCentral, so I was confident the solution would be excellent. But what convinced me to sign up—especially after meeting the other vendors—was that everyone I talked to at RingCentral treated this like a true partnership, not a sale to close. From my very first interaction, I felt supported by everyone at RingCentral—and I still feel that way today.”
The first thing that impressed me about RingCentral had nothing to do with the platform itself. It was the team behind it. The account managers were never pushy, and they never tried to sell us something we didn’t need. They were patient, listened to our needs, and helped us customize a communications environment perfectly suited to our remote staff and our changing needs.
Sarah Abbott
Chief Operating Officer
INDUSTRY
Online travel booking
HQ
Los Angeles, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
2020
EMPLOYEES
Online travel booking
Sarah also points out that her dedicated implementation team at RingCentral helped make the company’s rollout of the solution easy and painless. “Our implementation team was so helpful. They helped us record our phone greetings, walked us through using the online admin portal to set up our call routing plans, and patiently answered all our questions.”
Keeping a distributed team connected with a unified cloud environment
Soon after nomad.me rolled out RingEX—which let the team access their business numbers, SMS texting, and video conferencing from a unified app on their computers and smartphones—Sarah faced a family issue that put RingCentral’s communication capability to its first test. To help family members, she had to move from Southern California to an island off the coast of Wisconsin.
“I remember being nervous about moving so far away while we were getting this company off the ground. But our co-founder said, ‘Sarah, just go for it. We’ve got RingCentral. Us being in different states won’t slow things down.’ And he was 100% right.”
Today, she explains, the team uses their RingCentral softphone and mobile apps to easily connect with each other—as well as with partners, vendors, customers, and job candidates—in whatever communication format the situation calls for.
“We’ve been a global team essentially from day one. Our developers are in India, our designer is based in Italy, and we have other creatives working on nomad.me in San Diego. Everyone can communicate easily by phone because they’re all in our RingCentral cloud environment.”
Additionally, Sarah notes, the team does a lot of communication with vendors and partners via SMS text from their RingCentral apps. “The SMS capability is great because we can have those text communications in our RingCentral environment and never give out our personal numbers.”
Sarah also points out that she uses the built-in RingCentral Video for business meetings as well as to interview candidates. “If I’m talking with anyone outside our company, say a potential partner or a new-hire, I’m probably going to use the RingCentral Video. I really appreciate how clean and easy to use the app is, and that I can host or join a meeting from anywhere using the app on my phone.”
Planning to scale operations with RingCentral
Another reason nomad.me went with RingCentral, Sarah points out, was the platform’s ability to scale to meet the company’s ever-increasing needs. With nomad.me entering a rapid-growth phase now, she plans to leverage many of RingCentral’s capabilities—including integrations with other apps—to support the company’s expansion.
“We’re building out a more sophisticated customer call center, and we’re developing plans now for rolling out more RingCentral features to power it. That will include the call queues, the skills-based routing, the analytics engine, and integrating RingCentral with both our help desk app and our HubSpot CRM. It’s great to know we have a communications solution capable of growing with us—and in fact helping us to grow even faster.”
There are so many things you need to worry about when you’re a fast-growing startup. But because we have RingCentral for all our communications—phone calls, SMS texts, video meetings—our telecom solution has never been one of them.
Sarah Abbott
Chief Operating Officer