Wout op ‘t Ende (21, AT) and Ymiel van der Zanden (21, IBA) are the makers of this platform. Wout is telling UT Nieuws what exactly UnionDeals entails.
What brought you to the idea to start UnionDeals?
‘Last year, the SU-board was on an exchange in Finland. The local Student Union there had an online platform, Frank, where Finnish students could get the best deals in the area of entertainment, food and other services.
The SU-board then thought it would be a good idea to introduce a similar platform on the UT, the UnionDeals. We’ve created this for UT students. We don’t make any profit from it, we only look for the best deals.’
What kind of deals are you looking for?
‘We are basically interested in all services that are relevant for students. Think of driving lessons, discount on ordering food, or things like escape rooms. We mainly look for a good balance in price and quality. If this balance doesn’t provide us with some added value, we don’t close the deal. We want students to be able to find the absolute best deals on our platform, so that they don’t have to look any further.’
What kind of deals can you already provide for the students?
‘We have started our own package sending service about one-and-a-half months ago. With this service you can send a package via PostNL for a considerably reduced price.
Besides this packaging service we’ve also just closed a deal for driving lessons. This deal was made with a driving school, with one of the highest graduation percentages in Twente. With this deal, the costs for these lessons can be as much as 200 euros lower than the normal price.’
What kind of deals would you like to offer students in the future?
‘We currently want to expand the deals towards an escape room, among other services that interest students. Eventually, we would like to end up with something like frank.fi, that is our final goal.
To achieve that we will need help from students and associations. We would like to know what they would like to have as a deal. It is important that students give their input. Students can fill out a Google form, where they can give us their ideas for new deals.’
