“FROM TENANT AT DOCKWIZE TO INTERNATIONAL MULTI-ENTERPRISE”
Dockwize, the breeding ground for ideas, where we, as a startup, made a start in 2013 with internet agency Elloro. The place where we had the right resources to convert our ideas into two continuously growing companies. Dockwize wrote a nice piece about the success story of Recranet.
Elloro has been a tenant at Dockwize for no less than 6 years. In 2019, however, they outgrew their scope and it was time for their own location. The company continued its growth and expanded with various online concepts, including recranet.com.
The past two years have been a special time for Recranet. Their main product, the self-developed reservation software Recranet Booking, is dependent on holiday parks, campsites, hotels and rental organizations,” says owner Milko van Sighem. Almost all tourist organizations saw their turnover fall in the spring of 2020 due to the unexpectedly large number of cancellations due to the Corona crisis. As a result, a number of new assignments within Recranet were put on hold. Part of the work therefore came to a standstill from one day to the next.
Instead of onboarding new customers, Recranet immediately started developing functionality to unburden existing customers during that fierce first Corona period. For example, a voucher functionality was developed. Every press conference about current government measures was followed by a wave of cancellations or new reservations; the voucher function came in handy.
Yet suddenly the tide turned at Recranet. After the dip in the first half of 2020, the demand for automation suddenly increased enormously. Tourist entrepreneurs had to contend with a large increase in administrative activities, as relatively many recreation companies still worked manually or used outdated software. As a result, people turned to Recranet en masse. More than 80 campsites, holiday parks and rental organizations became customers in less than a year; not only for the reservation software, but often also with a new website and marketing strategy. This was an all-time record since the company's inception in 2015.
According to Milko, the greatest growth has long ceased to be in the 'home market' Zeeland, where Recranet, despite its relatively short existence, has meanwhile become the market leader. They are now growing very fast in the north of the Netherlands. The quality of the software and the total solution Recranet has to offer appeals to customers. Land borders are no barrier for the Zeeland startup; Recranet now has customers in Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Spain, Curaçao and France, among others.
“We have international ambitions and we will certainly achieve them! With the right people, we can quickly scale up, it's like Silicon Zeeland here.”
