Sitting at an airport on a four-hour layover during a business trip Karl Llewellyn had exhausted the urge to eat, drink and shop and was becoming decidedly bored. What he really wanted was somewhere to take exercise or have a swim and in that moment the idea for Sanctifly, which gives members access to airport hotels’ fitness, wellness and relaxation facilities without having to book a room, was born.
Sanctifly also provides travellers with advice, hints, tips, hacks and information on how to spend between one and six hours of a delay or layover before, after or between flights at 175 international airports. It covers runs, gyms, pools, spas, quite zones, meditation and yoga spaces, lounges, shower and sleep options and healthy places to eat. Individuals can sign up for an annual membership fee of $75 (€75). Corporates are charged on the basis of user volume and will purchase memberships as a health benefit for employees who travel a lot.
“We’ve gathered everything that is good for you within five miles of any international airport and we are 100 per cent focused on wellness and are not about access to ‘free bar’ lounges,” says Llewellyn, who first began teasing out the concept for Sanctifly in 2017. The MPV was rolled out a year later with a view to building out and scaling the idea in 2020. Then Covid arrived, changing air travel patterns overnight and all bets were off.
Llewellyn kept the business going with the support of his initial corporate customers and spent the two years of interrupted trading refining the product and building the company’s portfolio of partner organisations, such as major hotel groups and fitness facilities. The main focus for now is the US market, mainly because of the sheer volume of business travellers there but also because disrupted flights, long layovers and both red-eye and late flights are commonplace.
“Disrupted travel is our sweet spot and that’s more of a feature of air travel in the US than in Europe, for example. However, Covid has changed that to some extent and we are now seeing much stronger demand from Europe for our service,” says Llewellyn, whose company employs eight people and is based in Clonakilty in West Cork.
The company has three markets: enterprise memberships for organisations with 1,000+ staff who travel, loyalty programmes through credit card and life/health insurance companies, and travel management companies. In July the company announced a major deal, which was three years in the making, with Chase bank whose 33 million credit card members now have access to the Sanctifly app as a benefit.
To date, about €500,000 in hard cash and a significant amount of sweat equity has gone into bringing the idea to market. The company has been supported by West Cork LEO while Llewellyn says EI in the US has been invaluable in opening doors to potential enterprise-level customers.
Llewellyn comes from a 20-year background in senior management with companies such as VoxPro, where he was commercial director. He is also no stranger to the start-up world having founded and sold two businesses earlier in his career including process outsourcing company, Interaction, which was acquired for €14 million in 2006.
“Since Covid there has definitely been a greater focus on individual traveller wellbeing, while corporates see it as part of their duty of care to look after the employees they ask to travel,” Llewellyn says. “Travel warriors don’t want to spend hours sitting around in a bar because there’s nothing better to do. They want distractions, but ones based around healthy living and taking care of themselves while they’re on the move. Our system is fully integrated with over 3,500 wellness partners meaning a Sanctifly member simply shows a barcode on their phone for access to a facility.”
