Where are they now? Revisiting the Hot 25 Startups for 2020

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.

AirGateway

• 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.

Bacarai

• 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).

ConnexPay

• 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.

Cruisewatch

• 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.

Explorest

• 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.

ForwardX

• 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.

Futurestay

• Highlights: In 2020 we’ve raised $2.4 million, led by Brand New Matter Ventures and New York Angels, along with existing investors Newark Venture Partners and Harvard Business Alumni Angels. 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 recovery and beyond.

Hotailors

• 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.

Hotelmize

• 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.

Jet-Set Offset

• 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.

Journera

• 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.

Life House

• 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.

Magpie

• 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.

Pilota

• 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.

Questo

• 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.

Setoo

• 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.

SnapTravel

• 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.

Travelbank

• 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 Upside 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.