New product displays COVID-19 stats on airline, hotel and OTA websites

Bacarai - one of PhocusWire's Hot 25 Startups for 2020 - has developed a new API service that connects COVID-19 statistics to airport codes and hotel locations so that airlines, hotels and online travel agencies can display the data within their shopping workflows.

Bacarai co-founder and COO Kenny Totten says the idea for the SmartCheck product developed out of the realization that the COVID-19 crisis has caused people to consider a destination’s safety in trip planning, and many of the public sites consumers may access on their own could cause more fear or confusion than is warranted.

“Travel shopping has changed, and brands are going to have to show more data or travelers will search for it on their own,” Totten says.

“And the Johns Hopkins dashboard or other COVID tracking sites are designed to give total number of cases, but they are not really contextual.”

SmartCheck provides statistics such as total cases, new cases by day, total tests, number of people recovered and number of deaths, with data pulled from publicly available sources around the world. Airlines, hotels and OTAs can access SmartCheck via an API and then customize how the information is displayed on their sites – for example showing the trend of new cases on a line graph.

Totten says his team is also developing a Javascript widget that can be used by companies that do not have an internal team to customize the display.

For now travel brands can contact Bacarai to get access to SmartCheck. By May 30 the product will be available through a self-service platform.

Bacarai is part of the current SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco, a B2B travel technology accelerator, and Totten says some of the SAP Concur teams are now looking at SmartCheck.