Tell us about yourself and the journey that led you to roles at both TrustedHousesitters (as CEO) and, more recently, Maison Sport as a non-executive board member?
My early career was spent on the front line as a summer holiday and winter ski rep. It’s there that my deep love of the mountains and the travel industry really took hold. I should add, I started skiing relatively late and still consider myself an intermediate skier – I understand the pain points of those trying to improve and find the right instruction.
This hands-on experience of understanding the customer journey and associated operational challenges became the foundation for everything that followed. I then went on to lead several purpose-led travel and leisure businesses, including Crystal Ski, Le Boat and Sunsail.
My current role at TrustedHousesitters builds directly on this experience, applying those operational and strategic skills to a unique marketplace. TrustedHousesitters is a category creator with a vision to be the world’s most loved travel solution for pet people. The marketplace connects a global community of pet parents (demand) with sitters (supply), focusing on peer-to-peer trust.
Taking up the NED role at Maison Sport brings me full circle, back to the mountains, applying the same passion for creating value, driving network effects, and scaling a high-growth travel business.
Joining the Maison Sport board marks something of a return to your travel-industry roots. What attracted you to the company, and why did this feel like the right move at this point in your career?
What attracted me to Maison Sport is that it operates in a market I know and love, but it also reflects the next evolution of a great business model: the purpose-led marketplace.
I saw two powerful parallels with my experience at TrustedHousesitters:
- Category Creation: Maison Sport has created a new category – a vibrant marketplace that solves a big, painful problem for each side in a different way to the incumbents
- Solving a Pain Point: For instructors, each of whom has unique qualities, it’s about being able to connect with the right clients who can benefit from their skills and strengths. It’s the TrustedHousesitters for skiers, each of whom has unique requirements, ensuring they have an instructor they can trust to improve their enjoyment of the slopes.
This model successfully achieves a win-win: instructors increase their revenue, have more rewarding clients who are the right fit, and flexibility to manage their own schedules, while skiers get the democratisation of choice needed to find the perfect gender, language, and teaching style fit.
These are not incremental improvements; they are fundamental solutions. Maison Sport isn’t just selling lessons; it’s making instruction more accessible, fairer, and personal for everyone.
Maison Sport is at a stage in its development that I am familiar with. Product-market fit is proven beyond doubt, and scaling is the opportunity.
Maison Sport has seen strong growth over the last year, from revenue increases to expanding global demand. From your perspective, what makes the platform so successful in a competitive ski and outdoor travel market?
Maison Sport’s success is rooted in the fact that it’s a “10x better product” than the incumbent model, which is a key strategy for winning against the established order. They haven’t just digitised a traditional booking form; they’ve fundamentally recast the value proposition. The success factors are:
- Unique Inventory & Empowerment: The platform focuses on the supply side, bringing unique inventory (highly-rated, independent instructors) to an underserved market. By cutting out the middleman (ski school), instructors gain flexibility and better economics, which in turn attracts the best talent.
- Trust as a Differentiator: The business model tackles the inherent trust issues associated with a service marketplace head-on. Maison Sport enables direct connections and leverages a strong rating system to provide transparency, ensuring both buyers and sellers feel confident in the transaction.
- High Fragmentation: The traditional ski instruction market is highly fragmented, consolidated by an inefficient, out of date business model of ski schools which only create opacity. It’s therefore ripe for a marketplace that efficiently connects buyers and sellers. Maison Sport creates immense value by solving this discovery problem.
- Strong Marketplace Dynamics: The platform is engineered to drive powerful two-sided network effects, much like early Airbnb or Uber. The quality and success of the instructors (supply) directly attract more customers (demand), creating a self-sustaining growth engine.
What lessons from scaling TrustedHousesitters are most relevant to supporting Maison Sport’s next stage of growth?
The dynamics of running a two-sided marketplace are universal, and the lessons from scaling TrustedHousesitters are highly relevant.
Liquidity: Both businesses face the challenge of ramping up both sides – supply and demand – in near unison to achieve liquidity. At TrustedHousesitters, we have focused on careful monitoring of supply and demand to ensure high levels of matching. Maison Sport must ensure it has sufficient instructor density in new geographies to meet demand instantly, whilst ensuring that routes to market for customers are optimised for the highest possible level of matching.
Driving Network Effects: At TrustedHousesitters, the utility of the platform increases with each new participant, which is the definition of a network effect. Maison Sport must aggressively drive this virtuous cycle, where more instructors = more choice for skiers = better matching = more skiers = more instructors.
Preventing Leakage: Because both services involve a “monogamous” buyer/seller relationship (a sitter or an instructor that a client trusts), there’s a real risk of transactions leaving the platform. TrustedHousesitters has an annual membership business model, which eliminates the incentive for disintermediation. It’s important that Maison Sport focuses on creating strong incentives to keep the relationship tied to the platform, such as a well-designed rating system or added services that both sides value.
Maison Sport champions direct connections between travellers and highly rated instructors. How do you see traveller expectations shifting when it comes to authenticity, expertise and personalised experiences in the years to come?
Traveller expectations are irrevocably shifting from booking a commoditised service to curating a personalised, trust-based experience.
Authenticity/expertise: Travellers want to know who they are booking with. They are rejecting the opaque, “off-the-shelf” services from traditional ski schools in favour of knowing the instructor’s background, personality, and expertise before the lesson starts. They want certainty that their instructor will deliver the improvements they seek. Just as Airbnb created value by turning hosts into proprietors, Maison Sport empowers instructors to be entrepreneurial. The connection is direct, personal, and driven by mutual satisfaction.
Personalisation: Just as travellers on a long haul journey seek curated experiences, so skiers seek experiences that align with their personal goals and requirements. There is an element of “predictive certainty” that a focus on personalisation can deliver.
This hyper-personalisation extends to unique supply – where else can an intermediate skier, for example, book a lesson with an ex-Olympian instructor? Maison Sport has 18 on the platform.
You’ve worked across all sides of the ski industry – from ski rep to Managing Director of Crystal Ski. How does that hands-on experience shape your view of what the future of ski and outdoor travel could look like?
That hands-on experience – my front-line work as a rep is everything. It grounded me in the reality of delivering a holiday: what the customers value and where the operational friction lies.
In terms of the future:
- Community and Culture: My experience has taught me that the culture of a service business is felt by the customer. Maison Sport, like TrustedHousesitters, has the potential to build a strong community-driven marketplace where instructors feel a sense of identity and belonging, which translates directly into better service and brand loyalty for riders/skiers.
- The “Unbundling” of Travel: The future will continue to see the unbundling of generalised offerings, focusing on specialised, vertical providers. Maison Sport, by focusing purely on instruction, offers a 10x better service than any general travel site.
Technology is playing a much bigger role in how people plan and book activity-based holidays. What innovations do you think will have the biggest impact on experience-led marketplaces like Maison Sport?
The biggest innovations will centre on reducing friction, enhancing trust, and making the experience more predictable.
With any scaling business, data is a massive driver of success. Maison Sport can leverage its data infrastructure over time to further improve matching a skier’s ability, goals, and even personality with the perfect instructor. AI will undoubtedly play a key part in this.
What are your priorities as a board member in the months ahead, and how do you hope to help Maison Sport continue its expansion across Europe and beyond?
My priorities are focused on solidifying the foundation for scalable, global growth while maintaining the company’s core values.
Driving Liquidity and Density: This is paramount. We must be highly focused on identifying hot spots and doubling down on what works in terms of geography, audience, and price points to accelerate the virtuous cycle. Expansion must be strategic, ensuring we hit the necessary critical mass of supply in each new location.
Talent and Culture: Ultimately, success rests on the quality of the team. I will focus on helping the leadership team attract and retain the best talent needed to execute this high-growth plan while preserving the purpose-led culture that makes Maison Sport unique.
