Travel Startups Incubator® (TSI) is pleased to announce Streetography as its newest portfolio company. Streetography’s “place discovery,” mapping technology, helps increase travel booking conversions and user engagement through a form of social proof, by placing traveler’s photos on a map to visually showcase a destination.
Streetography’s Photo Map technology enables travelers to see what a destination’s culture and vibe looks like without being there. Depending on the map zoom level, one can view photos cut out by the boundaries of countries, states/regions, cities, neighborhoods, or blocks.
What’s the neighborhood character in San Francisco’s Chinatown? How about Greenwich Village in New York? Zoom in and take a look. Benefits for travel businesses like hotels and destination management companies include showcasing things to do and sharing photos of fascinating corners around your area, not just the everyday iconic tourist stops.
Streetography’s social feature enables businesses and travelers to upload their own photos, comment, and like users pictures. Businesses that open an Enterprise account with Streetography, receive an online dashboard and admin area for tracking, analytics and managing photos.
You can place the Streetography web widget easily on your website by pasting a few lines of code or white-label the iOS or Android app. The Streetography API will be available in Spring 2018.
Current travel companies using the Streetography web widget include tourism bureaus, DMO’s, tour operators and in-destination travel companies. The Streetography technology will benefit OTA’s, Meta-Search Engines and Travel Agencies as well.
The Silicon Valley startup is lead by successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike Lanza. “I came up with the idea for Streetography when I was searching for an apartment in Amsterdam on Airbnb for my family,” Lanza said. “The site had dozens of photos of apartments with the right number of bedrooms, in the right price range, but we weren’t interested in going to Amsterdam to look at the inside of an apartment. We couldn’t figure out which of the apartments was in the best neighborhood for us.”
Matt Zito, Manager Partner of Travel Startups Incubator®, says, “A picture tells a thousand words.” When we saw the photo mapping technology we knew instantly that we wanted to be a part of the startup with Mike and Streetography. Mapping technology is an integral part of the travel journey starting at the top of the funnel with discovery all the way to in-destination while you’re on your trip. Google Maps has dominated this space with not much advancement in the last few years. We think we can greatly improve the user experience for travelers with Streetography and increase conversions for travel businesses.”
The mapping technology space is heating up. Amadeus Ventures recently invested in AVUXI a global mapping technology company. Similar to Streetography, AVUXI overlays a map displaying the most popular travel destinations inside a city. This helps travelers learn where the best places to visit are located.
Contacts:
CEO, Mike Lanza
mike@streetography.com
http://streetography.com
Calling all Travel Tech Start-Ups. Do you have a Start-up in the travel tech space? Sign up for our Pitch Competition! Ten companies will pitch at the Future of Travel Summit, on February 12th, 2018 in front of 200 industry leaders and investors.
The Future of Travel Summit, is the first ever event in Miami to bring together start-ups developing disruptive technologies, angel investors, and established global travel brands. If you are a start-up that develops technology for the travel industry, this event not only gives you the opportunity to present your product to investors and travel industry leaders, but also offers the possibility to have one-to-one meetings with them.
Technology is an integral part of today’s travel experience, from booking to electronic boarding passes, digital concierge services to interactive city guides at destination, virtual reality tours to drone photography, new technology is continuing to reshape the way we move around, stay, and play.
For this unique, two-day event, The LAB Miami has created a complete program that combines pitch sessions from the most interesting and disruptive start-ups, compelling panel discussions and keynote speeches addressing the ever accelerating tech trends in travel, and even a hackathon! Established travel companies and venture investors will also have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with the start-ups.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
If you are a start-up that develops technology for the travel industry, this event not only gives you the opportunity to present your product to investors and travel industry leaders, but also offers the possibility to have one-to-one meetings with them.
If you are a VC or angel investor, you will find unique investment opportunities as well as new insights to inform your decision-making. If you are an executive in the travel and hospitality industry, this event gives you the opportunity to learn about the latest trends in technological innovation and digital disruption. You might even find the next tool or service to differentiate your company from the competition
The winners of the pitch competition will have the opportunity to present on stage at Seatrade, the leading trade show for cruise lines in March and will receive a prize package including free legal services, SendGrid credits, and free space to work at The LAB Miami, among others.
Sign up Now
If you are interested in finding out more about our event, feel free to visit our website and/or reach out to me at anytime.
The @flightbot pilot in Thailand on LINE is powered by Amadeus Search technology, facilitated by GoHero.ai artificial intelligence technology. GoHero.ai is a TSI portfolio company based in India.
Thailand is the second largest market for LINE. 33 million monthly active users spend an average of 70 minutes a day on the platform.
“GoHero was chosen as the technology solutions partner by Amadeus for their @flightbot project on the LINE messaging platform – the first Travel Agent Marketplace using chatbot in a messaging platform. The project uses GoHero’s proprietary artificial intelligence technology to facilitate flight search and bookings (in both English and Thai) and uses Amadeus’ technology to deliver content on the LINE messaging platform.” [1]
Thai LINE users can easily ask the @flightbot anything about travel, whether it’s a flight to Phuket or a flight to Europe.
image photo credit: NEXT Takeover, Amadeus Times Asia Pacific
GoHero.ai artificial intelligence technology helps travel agents convert more of their customers to bookings. Large numbers of offline travel agents offer a personalized service and the GoHero.ai technology allows them to move into the mobile chat space without sacrificing their personal touch.
The messaging chat bot user base is at 5.5B and growing fast. As of today GoHero.ai has expanded their offering across 11 different chat platforms including WeChat, LINE, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Slack and the service supports more than 70 languages.
[1] NEXT Takeover, Amadeus Times Asia Pacific
In what will go down as the most competitive head-to-head battle in EyeforTravel Startup Awards history, Dazzle a UK startup, edged out Bizly in the final seconds of voting to win 51% to 49%. Dazzle, is an AI powered, voice activated chatbot and hotel concierge. Runner-up Bizly, is a meeting platform for businesses to search and book event space at hotels.
Tim Gunstone, CEO EyeforTravel, Ron Shah, CEO Bizly, Charles Cadbury, CCO Dazzle and Tim Hentschel, CEO HotelPlanner
A special thanks to Tim Henschel, CEO of HotelPlanner, for sponsoring the Startup Awards, Brian Harniman with Brand New Matter, for coaching the 10 startups on their presentations and the following judges: Ganesh Mani, PHD MBDA Adjunct Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Entrepreneur & Investment Manager TravelWits.com, Brian Harniman, Managing Director, Brand New Matter, Matt Zito, Managing Partner, Travel Startups Incubator, Tim Hentschel, CEO, HotelPlanner.com, Jeena James, Global Head for Travel & Local, Apps, Google Play, Kurien Jacob, Principal, Highgate Ventures, Utpal Kaul, Head of New Product Incubation, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Christina Heggie, Venture Capitalist, JetBlue Ventures, Nathan Bobbin, Senior Director Product Innovation, Travelport.
Madhu Jain, Yappes and Nicole & Matt Zito, Travel Startups Incubator
10 startups gave pitches to the judges, including Yappes, a travel API marketplace and discovery platform helping travel companies discover, license and consume API’s. Madhu Jain and Yappes came all the way from India to attend the EyeforTravel conference. Yappes received multiple verbal commitments from travel companies at the conference to distribute their APIs on the Yappes platform. Yappes is a TSI portfolio company. The API platform currently has 60 API providers and 20 API consumers with thousands of transactions running through the platform.
This year we’ve focused on helping our portfolio companies and advisory clients gain technology pilots and licensing agreements with larger travel companies. We won’t sugar coat it, it’s a tough road.
We’ve successfully facilitated deals with GDS’s, Travel Management Companies, Airlines and Destination & Tourism Bureaus. Besides having a technology that is in demand, the key to success lies in three factors.
- Your startup needs to know what travel companies are piloting and who at the company is the Innovation leader that is sourcing deals or new technology for pilots.
- Your travel technology or solution has to solve a problem the corporate currently has and understands or meets one of their core innovation objectives.
- Your revenue model or how you make money has to align with their sales model.
Last week, I attended The Beat Live conference in Dallas, Texas. The conference catered to business travel and larger corporate travel companies. There were 100+ CEOs, Presidents, VP’s and Directors from almost every major travel company in the Airline, GDS and TMC verticals.
I participated on the Emerging Technology Panel with Miriam Moscovici, director of emerging technologies with BCD Travel, Suzanna Chiu, head of Amadeus Ventures and Ellen Keszler, CEO, Clear Sky Associates.
During the panel, I framed out a simple plan on how I believe the corporates in the room could engage with startups through piloting.
- Establish a piloting program within your Innovation Group or Business Development department.
- Reach out to the dozen or so travel technology incubators and accelerators to source deal flow for what you need.
- Segment off a sandbox or a small group of customers in your technology stack to pilot the new technology.
- Pay a small fee to each startup that enters the piloting program and system and a fee to the incubator or accelerator for the referral.
- Pilot 20 technologies per year. Similar to the “Power Law” in Venture Capital investing, a handful of the 20 will be valuable, impacting your business, creating a positive ROI for the pilot program.
Discussions during the conference centered on 2 themes, NDC the IATA distribution schema and the need to implement new technology quicker. A corporate piloting program is one way to create speed to market vs. trying to build the technology in house through an R&D department.
During the Buyers Table Panel, 3 corporate buyers of travel management services discussed innovation and technology. Panelist Yukari Tortorich, of Discovery Communications provided insight on how travel startups could pilot new technologies with her company.
- Offer a free trial service of 30-60 days. If you charge upfront you won’t get an opportunity.
- Monetize or charge your fee when your technology is part of the transaction or when a transaction takes place. It’s easier for the corporates to pay your fee after revenue has been earned.
In summary, startups need to spend time finding out who at a corporate travel company is sourcing new technology and has a pilot program. Second, startups need to make it very easy for corporates to pilot technology with a model to monetize after the trial period. Make sure your monetization model aligns with how the corporate makes money.
At TSI, we’ve built a corporate innovation and business development network and offer intros of new technologies to the network for pilots. If you have travel technology that is in demand for Airlines, GDS’s, TMC’s and Destination/Tourism Bureaus, please apply to our advisory program.
