Here's the story of an entrepreneur from Italy who runs a small souvenir shop in the historic center of Rome.
Watching tourists go by, he came to the conclusion that people are a bit weighed down during their walks around the city - by travel bags and heavy backpacks. They have to constantly drag them along or look for somewhere to leave them. In the center of Rome, where the main sights and souvenir shops like his own are concentrated, this is especially noticeable: tourists arrive straight from the train station or the airport with their luggage and end up hauling it through the narrow historic streets all day, instead of exploring the city hands-free.
That's how the entrepreneur, Jamie, came up with the idea of installing automatic storage lockers right in the tourist zone. And not just one, but an entire network of such storage lockers, so a tourist could leave their belongings near wherever they happened to be at the moment, instead of having to go back each time to a single storage point on the other side of the city.
Calculating the equipment's payback period
Knowing the cost of this kind of equipment, he set the average price for using a cell at 5-10 euros per day. Once he worked out the revenue side, it turned out the equipment would pay for itself in about a year on average. That's normal for Europe. But that wasn't good enough for Jamie. So he started thinking about how to increase the revenue from such a complex.
Opening of the automatic complex in Rome
The idea for a cell-booking web service
Next, they decided to build a full-featured web platform that tourists could use to book cells for their travel bags, book a hostel or apartment, get bed linen, and pay for all of it. Payment could be made with any card from anywhere in the world, either right on the website or directly at the automatic complex itself.
When Jamie first came to us with this idea, we honestly didn't know what to think at first. We're equipment manufacturers, we don't build websites.
Jamie said he'd have the website with the payment system built in Italy, and all he needed from us was the automatic complex with cells of various sizes. We agreed. But it later turned out that the website had to constantly interact with the cells: booking them, reporting whether a payment had gone through or not, tracking usage time, and so on. A website without a locker, like a locker without a website, can't exist on its own. They function as one whole.
WEBSITE FOR BOOKING AND PAYING FOR CELLS
Project implementation and launch in Rome
So we had to get to work. We put together a team. We drew up the technical specification. We got started. In February we delivered the equipment to Rome, assembled it, and put it into operation!
Our client had barely opened the automatic luggage storage point in the center of Rome when the first customers started coming in. Anyone who's going to be in Rome, be sure to try this service. We'd really love to get some feedback.
All the best!
