It’s
difficult, if not impossible, to fully convey what a strange and difficult year
this has been for the travel industry. While the stress of COVID-19 has permeated
every sector and role, it seems particularly challenging for startups and their
founders – many that ended 2019 with great momentum as part of an industry that
was in the midst of record growth.
The good news is
there are many travel startups that are finding ways to not just survive but in
fact thrive through this extraordinary year, whether by reconfiguring budgets,
pivoting their products, developing partnerships, identifying new opportunities
or a combination of all four.
On Monday next week we will
release our selection of the Hot 25 Startups for 2021. In preparation for that,
we have checked in with the companies that made the cut one year ago – our Hot 25 for 2020. We asked them to answer
two questions:
- Despite
the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, what have been a few
highlights of 2020 for your company (any partnerships, funding, change in
strategy, pivots, etc.) - What
are your priorities for 2021?
We heard from
almost all 25. Here are their answers, edited in some cases for brevity.
- Highlights: The COVID-19 situation has facilitated some airlines to accelerate
the transformation towards direct distribution (NDC), and this has allowed us
to sign our first customer travel management companies in the U.S., South Africa
and other regions. Also, we are now working with several top-25 global TMCs,
which were not in our range at the beginning of the year. - Priorities: We have
consolidated our strategy towards corporate travel where we see bigger and
easier opportunities since there will be a lot of redefinitions within the next
two to three years. We have signed relevant partnerships that will be made
public early in 2021.
- Highlights: In the spring, we completed the SAP Concur Accelerator, which paved
the way for Bacarai to be exposed to the broader business travel market. - Priorities: With demand for
student travel at a near standstill, we’ve turned our focus to building out
more features in our platform. We don’t expect much to change in the first half
of 2021 and are really looking towards the spring of 2022 for group travel to
bounce back (pending a vaccine).
- Highlights: Like any company focused on the travel industry, our business has
been significantly impacted by the pandemic. On a positive front, the pandemic
has exposed the weaknesses of the traditional payment models while
ConnexPay’s proprietary and innovative solution is proving its value. Earlier
this summer, we secured additional funding from existing and new investors, and
we have signed more new clients in the past 60 days than we did in all of 2019.
We are excited for the future as we continue to help our travel clients with
lower costs and increased revenue as they come out of this difficult time. - Priorities: In addition to investments in our core technology and our
customers, 2021 will highlight additional international payment capabilities. We
recently launched a solution that provides global payment capabilities with a
best in class card product. We will be supplementing that solution with an
ability to accept cards in other parts of the world as well.
- Highlights: Due to the virus, we did an
internal project about the future cruise market. From this starting point
we derived a new product roadmap, which purely focused on B2B, so we pivoted
from B2C to B2B. This idea wasn’t new, but we have accelerated the change. We
have a new website, cruisewatch.ai
and B2B products, including sentiment analysis of over 500,000 cruise
reviews, cruise price alert API for push notifications when prices are
changing, daily market overview dashboard and cruise price prediction. - Priorities: Number one priority is to help the
industry and our partners to recover. Therefore, we will offer our products for
free until the restart. Since feedback is core to our innovation process, we
will provide more partners with our products to learn from their experiences. Our
general goal for the next year is to execute our product pipeline. For us this
also means to create a scaling cruise intelligence infrastructure.
- Highlights: As many travel plans have been put on indefinite hold, we learned
to turn our curiosity back to our surroundings and seek out joy wherever we can
find it. Our community has grown to more than 185,000 people exploring more
than 1,600 of the world’s greatest places. In October, we took the next step in
growing our community by bringing the Explorest app to Android. Across
2020, we raised $400,000 and were accepted into TheVentureCity Growth
Program. - Priorities: As we grow and our community
expands, our values hold strong. Our locations are curated not just by great
photographers, but by people who care deeply about their craft and their
communities. While we expand our curators and locations around the globe, we’ll
maintain that focus on community, craft and care. And, as always, we remain deeply
committed to sustainable travel and exploration. From our partnership with
Leave No Trace to the ways we bring our own community together to protect and
care for the environment, responsible exploration will always be a core part of
our mission. We will be introducing exciting new app features that allow our
community to connect with each other and share their own locations and tips.
- Highlights: While
2020 has been a year to forget for many, ForwardX has had a milestone year
since our founding in 2016. We’ve seen increasing interest in our solutions
from manufacturers, retailers, and third-party logistics companies. We opened
an office and test center in the United States and raised $15 million from China Merchants Capital’s Sino-Belarussian Fund. We’ve also partnered
with Intel to deliver our solutions, joined Plug & Play’s Innovation
Accelerator and signed more than five local partners in China. - Priorities: Our number one focus is to continue to improve our product-market
fit and deliver the most useful and transformative solutions to our current and
future customers. In order to achieve this goal, we will prioritize the
following: continue to improve the scalability of our
solutions to bring them to a wider audience; expand our markets to serve any
and every geography that wants to empower their operations; design, test and
introduce new products and product accessories to continue meet more and more
scenarios within the logistics, manufacturing, and retail environments; create
an ecosystem of likeminded partners which fosters innovative results and
delivers value to wide audience.
- Highlights: In 2020
we’ve raised $2.4 million, led by Brand New Matter Ventures and Harvard
Business School Alumni Angels, along with existing investors Newark Venture
Partners. We grew our customer acquisition rate by 51% since Q3 2019,
reflecting the tenacity of short-term rental entrepreneurs even during a
pandemic. And we’ve released new features to help our property managers be recovery-ready,
including hardware-agnostic online check-in for short-term rentals in
partnership with Booking.com and auto
turnover buffers between guest stay. - Priorities: To
deliver the infrastructure that short-term rentals need to lead the
recoveryand beyond.
- Highlights: We have taken
advantage of the downturn in business travel and used this lull to develop our
market offer, our technology, strategic framework and human capital. Just
before the world went into lockdown, we were invited to join a three-month
SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco acceleration program, which we completed
successfully. We built an integration between our tool – which services
business travel for extended workforce – with SAP Concur and SAP Fieldglass. We’ve
also created new solutions to align with the new reality, such as strengthening
the “duty of care” aspect of our technology. We have also been developing an AI
module, which will allow a user to find a hotel that fits their preferences a
lot quicker and more precisely. Our innovation has had interest from Oracle,
and we will be further developing the idea using their Cloud solution. We also raised
$3 million, which has given us financial security during the pandemic and has
allowed us to focus on developing our innovation and technology. - Priorities: Our solution is part of the digital transformation in
business travel – and ironically, it’s easier to introduce it when business
travel isn’t taking place. We have strengthened our sales team and prepared a three-pillar
sales strategy, which we are already implementing. First, our analysis shows
that small- and medium-sized companies will start traveling again quicker than corporations,
therefore, we have channelled our sales efforts in this direction. We are also
reaching out to companies and sectors whose employees need physical meetings
and hence travel right now – for example production plants and shipowners. Second,
we have created an offer for TMCs that is an annual revenue share (when these
customers start travelling again), which will allow TMCs to focus their
energies on their core business, while their business clients in turn will gain
access to the newest travel technology that will increase their safety and
reduce their travel spend. The third pillar that we have been developing is
channel sales, in cooperation with our strategic partners, such as SAP, EY and
Oracle. We already see
traction on all abovementioned fronts, which shows we have been making the
right decisions. To be able to scale our business faster and take full
advantage of the current situation – and with commitment from one of our
strategic partners – we are looking at running an A round in 2021.
- Highlights: Hotelmize
accomplished a lot this year despite the pandemic. Two key things are first
that we closed our series B funding round led by Alibaba, the
Chinese internet giant. This made Hotelmize
more sustainable than ever and enables us to continue to establish
our position as market leaders in our field. And second, we have doubled our
client base and tripled our business size for when the market recovery
starts – showing great growth even in these times. - Priorities: In
2021 we will start to systematically market and sell our new products to the
industry to increase our contribution to our partners’ business and help them
to recover faster and become stronger than before. Tech is the key to their
success, and we are here to make sure they will have the best tech in the
world.
- Highlights: The global pandemic highlighted the climate effects of travel, as we
witnessed firsthand the drastic reductions in emissions and short-term
environmental benefits when air travel halted. This has increased consumer
awareness about carbon emissions from flying, and as we return to flying, Jet-Set
Offset is making it easy for travelers to be climate positive. At the start of
2020, we participated in the SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco B2B travel
technology accelerator, with six other early-stage enterprise startups. This
led to Jet-Set Offset becoming an SAP Concur partner, and building the first
enterprise carbon offset option for SAP Concur customers. Jet-Set Offset is now
powering the technology and marketing behind The Good Traveler — a sustainable travel brand started by San Diego Airport
Authority and now used by over 20 of the most climate-aligned airports in the
country. We’re looking forward to forming even more industry partnerships as we
work toward a decarbonized future for aviation. We’ve also developed a
partnership with Bluesource, the leading developer of offset projects
throughout North America. - Priorities: In 2021, our top priority is the
official launch of our green flight booking technology. We’ve spent the last
several months building a decision support tool for point of booking that provides
eco-conscious travelers with the opportunity to book a flight based on carbon
emissions — not just price and schedule. Because carbon emissions can vary
by up to 20% per flight route, this technology will provide consumers with even
more data to inform their travel decisions and support our growing community of
sustainable travelers and businesses. The technology also offers even more
opportunity for new and exciting partnerships within the aviation industry. We’re
also looking forward to growing our roster of climate-focused nonprofit
partners to provide even more choices to our Jet-Set Offset users, welcoming
new enterprise customers as employees begin to travel again, and fundraising to
accelerate our growth and develop new technologies.
- Highlights:
Journera,
the real-time data exchange platform for creating more seamless travel, expanded
its customer base, product offerings, investor roster and team in 2020.
Highlights include surpassing 400
million reservations and 2.5 billion data events processed by the Journera platform;
bringing new travel brands
onto the platform across multiple verticals and ancillary travel services;
developing new product offerings that help travel companies identify customers
about to travel and create “contactless” and safer travel for them on their
journeys; launching a new JourneyVision product for hotels and other
hospitality brands, supported by platform integrations with Guesty and Impala; closing an $11.6 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and B Capital; and adding Amadeus Ventures, the startup investment program of travel technology company Amadeus, as an investor. - Priorities: Journera will be
focused on helping the travel industry recover and thrive in 2021 and beyond through
a deep focus on helping brands create contactless travel experiences that make
travel safer and less stressful for customer; demand generation offerings that
help travel brands reach their customers who may be traveling, but not yet
booked with their brand; and expanding to new verticals, new customers and new
geographies.
- Highlights: In 2020
we have been very productive and partially fortunate having just raised capital
from great investors prior to COVID. We successfully launched our independent hotel management
company, Life Hospitality, to help owners of independent hotels without the
need for a renovation. With Life Hospitality we have tripled the size of our
portfolio and have signed everything from a AAA Five-Diamond, Forbes Five-Star
luxury hotel to a 375-key hotel in Atlanta. We have also embarked on
international expansion journey with three hotels in Mexico and launched a few new Life House-branded hotels in select markets like Nantucket
and Denver. We
secured over $300 million in new real estate capital partnerships from
institutional groups that we’re poised to deploy later this year and in 2021,
and we have continued to grow our tech team and have been busy launching new
features to continually automate costs & unnecessary labor, and enhance the
guest experience. - Priorities: We are
actively exploring various merger and acquisition opportunities, whereby Life
House would acquire a growing brand and/or management company, and we have a large strategic partnership that
we will announce prior to year-end that will drive meaningful benefits current
and future real estate partners. We will look to continue to grow our portfolio
in Mexico, and we’ll hope to get more aggressive in buying independent hotels
that are in need of improvements related to COVID or otherwise. As the market
size for struggling hotels has grown we will likely launch a couple of new
brands to cater specifically to the trends of real estate that need help.
- Highlights: Despite
the impact that COVID has had on the tours and activities sector, we’ve seen
strong growth in users turning to Magpie to manage their product content across
OTAs and resellers. We’ve grown the number of Magpie platform users (including
paid users), we’ve seen growth in the number of products that our users have
added to the Magpie platform and overall increases in platform usage. At the
time of writing last year, we had 500 tour and activity products loaded onto
the platform. Today, we have over 10,000. This year we signed our first
OTA partnership agreement, with Headout. In addition to Headout, we now have
integrations that let operators publish and manage their product content on
OTAs including Tripadvisor/Viator, Expedia, GetYourGuide, Musement/Booking.com
plus many more resellers. We launched a new full-service product
offering – Magpie Promotes, providing a fully-managed service to help operators
build and run a reseller/OTA distribution program that delivers bookings. We’ve
added over 30 new features to the Magpie platform and launched our developer
API for OTAs and resellers, giving them flexible access to all the operators
and product content on the Magpie platform. - Priorities: First and
foremost, we want to continue to support the industry and be a force for
recovery, helping operators get back to business post-pandemic. We’ll do this
through continued pricing support for operators whose business has been
negatively affected. For 2021, we have three key focuses: first,
signing more reseller agreements, making it even easier for operators to gain
more distribution for their products. Through 2021 we aim to bring hundreds of
new OTAs and distributors onto the Magpie platform. Second, continuing
to build both features to give operators advanced control over their content
across their networks of resellers, as well as features for OTAs and resellers,
including further development of our API. And third, bringing new
operators onto the platform and introducing them to the improvements that
Magpie can make to their content management and distribution efforts.
- Highlights and priorities: We have decided to
expand our suite of products to respond to the ongoing challenges that COVID-19
has brought about in the travel industry. Our first product focuses heavily on
the risk of flight disruptions and we decided to expand our risk assessment
products to include health and safety risk. We launched FlySafe earlier this
year, a product that allows travelers to assess the health and safety risk of
their journey as they browse on online booking platforms. It is available in
the chrome store for free download for leisure travelers.
- Highlights: In February we reached an all-time high in terms of sales. Then, COVID
hit us from two different angles. For one, our number of travelers went down,
but for the other, we had the opportunity to grow faster than expected because
we had a product fit for the current environment and for the future. With
Questo, people explore in the safest way possible, on their own, without
interacting with a tour guide or a group. Also, the experience is flexible and
fun, meaning that you can start and stop whenever you want, while exploring
your own city or traveling. In this context, we managed to raise a round in the
summer and started working on growing Questo globally. Seven months after COVID,
we managed to launch in 50 new cities, partner with more than 30 tour
operators and reach a faster than expected recovery during the summer. Going
forward, our goal is to become the number one city exploration activity in the
world for both locals and travelers. - Priorities: In
2021 we will continue creating new quests by working together with partners
from all around the world. However, by comparison with 2020, next year we will
also start to consolidate our presence in some of the cities where we are
already available. This will help us in increasing our reach by offering quests
for all kinds of customer types and interests. There is no limit to what we can
create in Questo, and we want to leverage this “limitless” advantage.
Also, 2021 will be the year in which we’ll invest more in Questo as a product.
We are working already on some great new features that will enhance the
exploration activity and can’t wait to release them early next year.
- Highlights and priorities: While indeed 2020
was quite challenging, we were able to secure a few customers/partners like
Amadeus and OYO homes and we’ve been very busy in extending our work with
the existing customers. Setoo is a B2B2C company, and we are working with
online businesses that understand that the name of the game is providing the
right protection to the consumer with the best user experience. For this,
Amadeus partnered with us and we see this as one of the biggest steps achieved.
- Highlights: We were able to turn the company
profitable during COVID-19 and have returned back to growth. Product tweaks in
combination with having a direct relationship with our customers over messaging
has allowed us to grow profitably during this difficult time. - Priorities: Customers are asking us for more than we currently offer – tickets,
tours and activities, restaurants. Our priority is to expand the business in a
way that allows us to give our customers what they want while maintaining an
exceptional customer experience.
- Highlights: It was clear to us at
the beginning of COVID-19 that companies were going to need solutions that
allowed for an easy onboarding and expense management experience for a
distributed workforce. We saw this as an opportunity to pivot in our strategy
and provide our customers with a quick and easy way to revamp their expense
policies and reconcile spend. From the release of our work from home features
and our recent expense management features, we’ve prioritized the expense side
of our all-in-one travel and expense platform. Despite the challenges created
by this global pandemic, we have been fortunate enough to partner with some
amazing companies this year. In the second half of the year alone we partnered
with pside Travel and World Travel to help enhance their users’ expense
experience. Our partnership with U.S. Bank also marked an important milestone
for us because we believe virtual cards are the future of payments, so working
with them and seeing the Instant Card in action has been great. We are excited
to continue these relationships and partner with more in the coming months. - Priorities: If 2020 has taught us anything,
it’s that you simply cannot prepare for the unknown. So in 2021 we at
TravelBank are looking forward to prioritizing our partnership with U.S. Bank
and doubling down on virtual and corporate card management. As always, we will
continue to focus on expenses and credit cards while really pushing for contactless payments which
in turn gives precedence to the security and privacy of customer data. When it
comes to business travel recovery, we will be ready for its return, whenever
that is of course.
