Successful travel startup founders are always asking.

Are you asking

Asking is part of selling.
Before you can sell you have to ask.

In startup mode it seems like we ask, ask and then ask some more.
If you don’t ask you’ll never get anywhere.
It’s as simple as that.

I launched the Travel Startups Founders Series in early 2013, short inspirational interviews I do with leading travel CEOs and founders by asking other founders to do an interview with me.

The first person I asked was Steve Kaufer the CEO of TripAdvisor.
Yes, I am not kidding he was the first person I asked.
The CEO and founder of the world’s largest travel company.
I figured if I was going to go big I needed the biggest player in travel.
I cold called him. Actually I cold emailed him. (more…)

Travel Startups Incubator invests in Tutton

Tutton

Travel Startups Incubator is pleased to announce our investment in mobile travel app Tutton, a Mexico startup with an office in San Francisco, CA led by co-founders Oscar Rodriguez and Eduardo Iglesias.

Tutton helps you find your friends when you travel.

Tutton is currently in BETA.
Please go here to become a BETA tester. Tutton will be available in both Spanish and English at launch.

Matt Zito, Managing Partner at Travel Startups Incubator says, Oscar and Eduardo are talented young entrepreneurs building an amazing mobile travel app that helps you connect with your friends and friends of friends when you are traveling.

Say your traveling this weekend to New York City. You open Tutton and instantly you can see what friends you have from Facebook and Twitter that are in New York City right now. The beauty of the app is that your friends don’t need to download Tutton because the information comes from the social network. Through a proprietary algorithm and filter system Tutton in a non-invasive way mines your social media feeds to decipher “where your friends are.”

Before Your Trip to NYC:
You can look for friends that are in NYC right now, even though you aren’t there yet. You will know that your friends are in NYC if they post something with location in their social networks (Twitter and Facebook) or if their hometown is NYC.

Your Arrival in NYC:
Tutton will know that you move from your location to NYC with the core location framework of the smartphone. The app will send this notification: “Welcome to NYC, make a Check-in in Tutton to let your friends know you are here!”

Look for friends that are in NYC at that moment. If your friends have Tutton, you can use the internal messaging system to communicate with them, if not,  they will receive the message in the messaging system of the social network (Facebook Messenger or Direct Message of Twitter).

Check-in from Tutton and share it in the social networks. You will know that friends of friends are close to you. This information will be limited, you will only be able to see: Name, photo, mutual friends that are in NYC. You will be able to send a friend request, and if he/she accepted you would see all their check-ins and the messaging system will be available.

Your Friends in NYC:
If you make a Check-in from Tutton or any social network, we will send a notification like this: “Your friend Matt is in NYC, contact him!” This notification will be only made when the user travels from one city to another city, to avoid spamming.

Contacts:
Oscar Rodriguez and Eduardo Iglesias
Co-founders of Tutton
oscar.rodriguez@tuttonapp.com
Phone: +1 (415) 629-2125
Skype: oscar.marcelo88

Tutton

Travel Platforms and Travel APIs are the NEW drivers of growth in the travel industry.

Platforms (open sales and distribution systems) and the API (application programming interface) are driving the next phase of growth in the travel industry.

Leading travel companies are transitioning from building their own new products and services to building software platforms that enable travel startups and 3rd party companies to connect and tap into to their sales systems.

Platforms are helping travel companies sell more than they could by selling on their own.

In the past if a travel company wanted to expand their business the option was either to build the product or acquire it by buying another travel company. A more efficient, quicker and possibly more profitable model is to license 3rd party products and services through APIs. In this new evolving business model your company can be generating revenue in a few weeks to one-two months.

Platforms and APIs speed up the sales process enabling the platform company to drive growth quicker with less risk.

Platforms are being conceived right now by the worlds most trusted travel brands and executed by the smartest players in the room.

Sam Shank the founder of Hotel Tonight gave a recent talk at Phocuswright. The backside of his presentation a “Hotel Stay from the Future” included how he envisioned the perfect hotel mobile booking experience and what he thinks it could look like.

His vision for the perfect mobile hotel booking experience looks like a travel platform with multiple partners integrating into the platform with their APIs.

I can’t speak for Sam but don’t think for a moment that he and his team are not thinking about how Hotel Tonight can become a platform to provide a hotel guest a total end-to-end customer experience.

I recently attended the Concur’s DevCon conference in San Francisco. Steve Singh’s presentation was an eye opener. The depth of his thinking and the extent of how big Concur’s platform can really be was truly amazing.

Concur has an open platform focused on transforming the travel industry and providing value to business travelers. Travel companies that have products and services that business travelers would be interested in can get distribution for their product through the App Center. Concur is facilitating the ability for 3rd party travel companies to plugin and gain access to Concur’s 25M business travelers.

Sabre’s Dev Studio is commercializing their technology by providing their APIs to get distributed and integrated into 3rd party travel businesses and new products and services. The Sabre Red App Centre is a B2B marketplace that enables travel companies around the world to make their apps available to travel agents. This is a similar model to Concur’s App Center.

Partner Fusion one of my clients and some of the smartest online travel marketers in the world are building Travel Pass, a platform to sell travel direct to consumers integrating multiple travel APIs.

FlitWays one of the Travel Startup Incubator portfolio companies has an API to provide ground transportation services for travel companies that want to integrate transportation for their customers. FlitWays can be integrated into Homeaway, Hotel Tonight and Sabre’s Dev Studio. FlitWays is currently considering integrating with Concur.

Homeaway recently announced that they are integrating Gogobot, Uber and Instacart into the vacation rental marketplace to improve the guest experience and provide multiple services for vacationers. From the sounds of this announcement it seems as if Homeaway is moving towards developing a platform.

Proxce one of the Travel Startup Incubator portfolio companies will have an API coming out of Beta testing that will enable OTAs and travel companies the ability to provide their guests to automatically check-in to hotels.

Finally at TravelStartups.co we are moving towards building a global platform for travel startups to raise seed capital, get advisement and mentoring, do business development deals, network with founders, acquire follow-on capital and pitch to investors. We envision one-day the ability for travel startups to plugin to our platform to help build their business from idea-to-launch of their startup to IPO.

Travefy & Zipkick Travel Startup Founders Video Series

I had the pleasure of talking with David Chait the founder of Travefy and Jason Will the founder of Zipkick at the Concur DevCon conference in San Francisco, California.

Travefy is a group travel planner. Plan trip details together, collect money from the group for trip costs & make a custom itinerary.

Zipkick is a travel search and booking site that brings unique, relevant results to users across all platforms.

Today we lost Henry Wang a great technologist, a big thinker and a friend.

Henry Wang

Our friend and team member Henry Wang passed away yesterday on November 9th from a rare form of cancer that he had battled for over 4 months. Henry was an advisor on the Travel Startups Incubator team and a close confidant of Managing Partner, Matt Zito.

Henry had a rare gift of not only being a technology expert but a business strategist as well. He was inspirational in helping us see the transition from an advisory business model for startups to an incubator model where we both funded and advised travel startups. Henry will be greatly missed by the entire Travel Startups team.

Mr. Wang had 20+ years of experience architecting and implementing state-of-the-art enterprise application solutions with cost-effective and high-available IT infrastructures that foster company growth. Clients under Mr. Wang’s management included: Onboard.com, Opodo, OneTravel.com, Rovia.com, World Ventures, Travel Leaders Group and United.com.