Turn your walks into a treasure hunt with Foxie
Liven up your city tours by turning your surroundings into a real playground.
🦊Presentation
If there is one thing we are sure of, one month after conducting our *Learning Expedition* on the theme of the future of tourism and travel, it is the need to move towards local tourism. As for many other subjects, the focus is on the local and the new challenge: to create the desire to go to Amiens rather than to Thailand.
Developing local tourism is exactly what Foxie proposes. The idea? Boost our visits and strolls with a simple application that turns our cities into a real playground.
Are you intrigued like us? Then we’ll tell you more about it right now!
⚙️ How does it work?
Foxie is a mobile application that proposes to transform our cities into a playground for visiting. To do this, the application offers three types of games:
- Fun walk: discover your surroundings and improve your culture through observation-based puzzles;
- Tracking Game: more challenging this time, with a faster format and in which observation and reflection puzzles are intertwined;
- Investigation: This last game mode is inspired by the popular escape game, and plunges you into a life-size Cluedo.
To play, nothing could be easier: gather with your family or friends, launch the application, choose your route and go out to discover the surroundings.
In a spirit of sharing and community, Foxie even offers the most adventurous among you the opportunity to build and share their routes. So don’t hesitate to check out the app if you’re addicted to your city, its surroundings, and its history, we’re sure you’ll create an amazing route!
Of course, the startup’s team has already prepared a few routes and already offers games in the following cities: Amiens, Athens, Bethune, Blois, Chinon, Lille, Nantes, Orleans, Tours, Paris, Rennes, Rome, Saint-Restitut, and Vence.
To cater to larger groups, Foxie also offers courses for Team-building, or bachelorette or boy activities.
🪙Business Model
Although many courses are free, Foxie also offers courses for a fee. These can be purchased directly on the application or from third parties (tourist offices…). In the latter case, you will be given a coupon to enter into the app to unlock the content.
For the paid courses, unlike competitors who usually charge a group rate, Foxie offers a price per participant so that small teams are not penalized in terms of budget. The price is between 10 and 15€ per person.
Once you have purchased the premium course, you will have unlimited access to it even from another smartphone than yours. The only requirement is to connect to your Foxie account.
Foxie also offers to create your own digital experiences. For 249€ per month, you will get the creator license and have access to their creation studio, training, maintenance, coupons to market the game, distribution of the game on IOS & Android, etc…
🏦Fundraising & Support
The company, founded in 2017, currently has no fundraising.
On the support side, Foxie has been incubated by French Event Booster, the first incubator dedicated to the events sector.
💹Market
It is difficult to identify the Foxie market. France is indeedthe first international tourist destination in terms of the number of visitors, but the places visited are often limited to Paris and a few specific places (Mont-Saint Michel, Le Puy du Fou,…). What’s more, the application only offers its Paris tours in English for the moment.
As far as tourism is concerned, you won’t learn anything by telling you that Covid-19 has had an unprecedented impact on the sector.
What should be considered is the local tourism of French people in France and this tourism has rather survived because of the health restrictions depriving French people to leave the hexagon.
In 2018, 66% of French people over 15 years old went on vacation. Among this 66%, 80% chose to travel to France. We can thus deduce that the number of people targeted by Foxie represents about 35 million people.
🤼Concurrents
In the last few years, many applications and websites for treasure hunts have been developed. The formulas proposed are never exactly the same. Whether alone or in a group, accompanied by a guide or on a mobile application, paid or free, a la carte or predefined, here is a selection of different offers on the market competing with Foxie:
Qui veut pister — each city has its own website
The business part of this article was written by Emilie Nouacer, the tech part by Mathieu Van de catsije.
