Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024: Acai Travel

Acai Travel

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Riccardo Vittoria

Website: Acai Travel

Founding date: 2023

Investment: $500,000

Acai Travel offers a suite of large language model-based travel operation optimization products to a diverse range of travel call centers, including travel management companies, online travel agencies, airlines, hotels and banks.

Our solutions empower clients to restructure their call centers with flexible setups and aim for up to 60% reduction in average handle time, effectively cutting operational costs in half.

Founders Riccardo Vittoria and Henry chen Weinstein

Strategic goals for 2024

By the end of 2024, we want our product suite to be integrated and operational with 20-plus clients. At the beginning of 2024, we are releasing three products:

• Blueberry: a travel-specific knowledge management system. This is an agent's best friend that can help with any of the complicated travel operations issues.
• Raspberry: a chat and email automation software that operates in both auto-pilot and co-pilot modes, aiding agents in processing informational and transactional queries in half the time.
• Strawberry: a GDS overlay in natural language, allowing anyone to service transactions without prior GDS training.

For instance, a TMC, with our products, can redesign call centers to be account, language and GDS agnostic while also cutting the average handle time in half.

Lessons learned since founding

We have a rich history in the travel industry, including selling a previous company to American Express GBT that specialized in AI software for TMC operations. We've also been investing in travel for over a decade and were the founders of Travel Tech Nation, a platform that connects travel executives. 

Although we've been deeply involved in travel technology and operations for years and have a strong understanding of what works and what doesn't, we continually discover new use cases for our products, thanks to great feedback from our clients and prospects. They often have genius ideas.

Additionally, while we initially thought that tailoring our products to different types of travel companies would require significant investments, we've found that challenges are very similar across segments and LLMs are very versatile. We can build machine learning algorithms at a fraction of the cost we used to build AI for, so we can quickly adapt to any call center's needs.