There are not many startups that manage to sign a partnership agreement with a big brand before they even launch. And there are perhaps even fewer new businesses that get details written into the same deal that include how an exit via an acquisition might look. But that's what happened to Boston, U.S.-based FlipKey, when it secured a partnership with Tripadvisor to help get the vacation rental marketplace off the ground in 2007. This wasn't because it was the wild west of private accommodation a...
Jun 25, 2021•40 min•Season 3Ep. 70
Dean Donovan has one foot in the past and, without doubt, one foot in the future. After a five-year career at the Bain consultancy, Donovan and his business partner (Brian Flynn) played central roles in 2004 to the creation and backing of Volaris, Mexico's first low-cost carrier. DiamondStream Partners, the investment house that they created the year before, has since go on to become an important player in the development of companies and technology in the mobility sector. Transforming "rough di...
Jun 18, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 69
Stepping into the hot seat of a family-run business that has been operating since the 1920s must be a fairly daunting task. That's what Brett Tollman in 2000 when he became CEO of The Travel Corporation - one of the oldest groups of companies in the travel industry. The business remains privately-owned and now operates in over 70 countries, with over 40 offices and more than 10,000 employees. The Travel Corporation operates 29 brands including specialists in guided holidays, luxury river-cruisin...
Jun 10, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 68
The unconventional stories of a company's founding are often the most interesting - rather than the fairly formulaic idea-when-traveling-Y-Combinator-seed-investment-route. After studies overseas, Richard Valtr was back in his home country of the Czech Republic and helping with a family project to renovate and build a hotel, when the concept of Mews was formed. Now powering 2,000 hospitality brands around the world, Mews is a platform to automate and simplify operations for hotels and their gues...
Jun 03, 2021•50 min•Season 3Ep. 67
HolidayPirates was born in 2012 - essentially as a travel hack for people to find cheap air tickets. This came about after co-founder Sebastian Kaatz (now the companys vice president of special products and projects) got increasingly frustrated about the lack of information online for travelers to get secure decent fares. The content site, based in Germany, quickly morphed into a listings service for discounted air tickets and the company has been growing ever since. With a need to add some busi...
May 27, 2021•51 min•Season 3Ep. 66
Alex Cruz admits that his career has been centered around people "betting on me" as a leader of businesses. During the course of over 30 years, Cruz worked for American Airlines and Sabre in the 1990s before a brief stint in the world of management consultancy at Accenture. But it was the lure of creating a brand new airline in the guise of low-cost carrier Clickair in 2006 that brought it back to aviation. It was this frenetic period running what was essentially a startup that raised his profil...
May 20, 2021•55 min•Season 3Ep. 65
John Guscic is one of the increasingly rare breeds in the travel industry these days. He's an unusually straight-talking company executive who has been in the sector for many years, from the world of global distribution systems to, now, online travel agencies and hotel accommodation wholesaling. The path to the top of Australia-headquartered Webjet is a different one to those that many leaders have taken, having sat on its board of directors since the early 2000s before becoming managing directo...
May 13, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 64
The formation of Travel + Leisure Co. in January this year marked an important milestone in the career trajectory of its president Noah Brodsky. The new organization, which came about after Wyndham Destinations acquired the Travel + Leisure brand for $100 million, is now a multi-purpose group with a media arm (Travel + Leisure), membership club, timeshare and new online travel agency in the guise of BookTandL . It's 20 years on from when Brodsky talked his way into a restaurant manager job in Ha...
May 06, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 63
A common thread in Joah Searman's origin story is one of countering adversity. Localeur was born in 2013 with a mission to help people discover and share the best local places to "eat, drink and play" in destinations around the world. A tough market to crack (there have been many brands that have tried and failed along the way), Spearman's commitment to the cause along the way has seen the company survive and evolve over the intervening eight years. The company has raised (only) a modest $6 mill...
Apr 29, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 62
Ride-hailing services such as Grab, Uber and Lyft have captured a disproportionate amount of attention since their respective launches. It's easy to say this because Spain-based Cabify has fairly quietly gone about its business and created a widely-used service in its home market and successfully expanded to Latin America. The company was formed in 2011 by Juan de Antonio and has since gone on to raise close to €500 million in capital support. Cabify has achieved this by attempting to do things ...
Apr 22, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 61
Apple Leisure Group is a major seller of tickets, packages and hotels across multiple brands. The company was formed by way of a number of mergers and acquisitions, including most recently a deal to combine with the Mark Travel Corporation. The history of the organization is one marked with taking opportunities when they arise, guesswork and luck, plus making some crucial strategic decisions. Alex Zozaya was CEO of the group until 2019, when he moved aside to become executive chairman and hand o...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 60
Rolf Schromgens was broke and scarred from the experience of a previous startup when he finally sat down with his co-founders and created Trivago. The company, which is now one of the leading hotel metasearch sites in the market, was built on the learnings from those earlier ventures and a desire to grow on revenue rather than take large sums of capital from investors (it raised just $55 million before a $632 million backing from Expedia Group in 2013). Schromgens admits that the initial proposi...
Apr 08, 2021•48 min•Season 3Ep. 59
Rami Zeidan is a founder on a mission. After working in the finance and real estate worlds for the early part of his career, including overseeing such activities for Starwood, Zeidan took the plunge into the operational part of the equation and launched his own hospitality brand. Life House was created in 2017 and has since grown to include a portfolio of its own properties and dozens more under management. The lifestyle-type hotel brand has since gone on to raise around $40 million in investmen...
Apr 01, 2021•48 min•Season 3Ep. 58
Greg O'Hara has become an influential player on the travel scene since he joined Sabre in the 1990s. He admits to quitting roles after falling out with management - or getting fired - on a number of occasions in the intervening years before creating the Certares private equity vehicle in 2012. But that experience at Sabre, Worldspan and JPMorgan has created an astute and outspoken financial operator, with interests and investments through Certares at Liberty Tripadvisor, AmaWaterways, G Adventur...
Mar 25, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 57
Duffel has generated a fair amount of buzz since it came on the scene in 2017. In part, this was due to a strategy to try and keep "stealthy" during its early phase of building a next-generation airline distribution platform. It eventually emerged into the public eye with a sizeable investment round (it has since raised over $56 million in capital) and a number of important partners, including American Airlines and British Airways. Steve Domin and the founding team used the quiet period to learn...
Mar 18, 2021•34 min•Season 3Ep. 56
There are not too many two childhood friends who ventured into different worlds of work and then came back to form a startup in the travel industry. But Julian Stiefel and Julian Weselek of Tourlane did exactly that and now, half a decade on, Tourlane is one of the leading multi-day tours and activities platforms in the market. The Germany-based company has raised over $100 million in investment capital and curates trips in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Middle East. Weselek...
Mar 11, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 55
Avi Brosh was a successful real estate executive before he became passionate about hospitality. But that shift into the hotel sector was not driven by a desire to create identikit properties at the budget end of the market or, indeed, identikit properties for the upscale market. Palisociety was formed with design at the heart of everything it does, from the location and architecture to ancillaries and furnishings. In short, Brosh is obsessed with the design aspects of his portfolio of hotels - w...
Mar 04, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 54
Atle Skalleberg's career so far has been a combination of being in the right place at the right time, smart decisions and perseverance. After arriving in the U.S. from Norway, he eventually took a job at StudentUniverse, prepared to do anything in order to learn the basics of business and, just as importantly, secure a visa. Within a few years, he was running the company - an online travel agency for youth and student travel - and setting it on a period of growth, an acquisition and its eventual...
Feb 25, 2021•40 min•Season 3Ep. 53
It's not the most well-trodden path in online travel - a producer on the hit The Daily Show With John Stewart to CEO of a tours and activities business. But it's one that Jamie Wong took when she launched Vayable, pivoting from the world of television in 2010. The U.S.-based platform connected tourists with locals providing experiences in their cities, starting in San Francisco where Wong headquartered the company. Getting a nascent business off the ground, in what was then still an emerging cat...
Feb 18, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 52
The concept of upmarket hostel accommodation was, some argue, fairly alien in the youth travel sector until fairly recently. Generator Hostels was a single-property brand in London, launched in the mid-1990s, but was considered the perfect place to try out a new approach to the sector when Josh Wyatt came onboard in 2007 with a pile of venture money. The hostel was overhauled and reopened with, as he puts it, "design and experience" at the center. Within a few years, the brand had expanded quick...
Feb 11, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 51
In one respect, ToursByLocals is a classic startup story. It was the brainchild of CEO Paul Melhus and chief technology officer Dave Vincent, with them having observed how the tour guide scene was handled during a trip to China in the mid-2000s. They launched the business - a platform to find and reserve tour guides in numerous countries around the world - in 2008. But there the typical linear nature of a startup tale ends. ToursByLocals, based in Vancouver, Canada, expanded quickly for the next...
Nov 11, 2020•43 min•Season 2Ep. 50
As digitalization of the airline sector has increased exponentially over the last decade, a number of new business have emerged to compete alongside the existing giants. One such brand is Flyr, based in the U.S. and founded by Alex Mans. The company is focused on revenue management, distribution and e-commerce for carriers and partners, allowing them to do a better job of selling seats and ancillary products with real-time dynamic pricing. Mans started our as chief technology officer of the busi...
Nov 05, 2020•40 min•Season 2Ep. 49
The modern story of HRS (Hotel Reservation Service) is one of geographic growth, expansion into new business areas and a handing over of the baton from father to son. But the company has its roots going back to 1972, when it was created in Cologne, Germany, as a travel agency that concentrated on booking accommodation for exhibitions. Robert Ragge ran the business until 2008, when his son Tobias (already an employee) took over the reins. The transfer of power, after the retirement of a brand's f...
Oct 28, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 48
It takes a lot to change a mindset that has prevailed for decades. Bikes (and scooters) are, for many people, mostly a thing of enjoyment. But Lime had other ideas, driven by a desire to rethink the bike as something that can be used for both leisure and commuting, at the same time as doing something positive for urban environments. The company was in development for a few years before it launched but it seems extraordinary that it has now only really been in existence for nearly four years, suc...
Oct 21, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 47
Lastminute.com Group's name didn't start out that way. BravoFly Rumbo switched its corporate identity after an acquisition of the former European darling of the online travel world in 2015. Spearheading the business since 2004 is Fabio Cannavale, a former founder at Spanish online travel agency eDreams, who pushed BravoFly through a string of acquisitions and growth programs in the intervening 11 years. The company now sits in the mid-tier of European OTAs, headquartered in Switzerland, with web...
Oct 14, 2020•51 min•Season 2Ep. 46
FlixBus is a travel startup that was created not specifically out of personal experiences of its founders but from gutsy opportunism. Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert and André Schwämmlein realized that the deregulation of the German bus market would open up the market to competition, both at the operator and booking platform level. It combined the two elements with a smart leasing system that aggregated and branded smaller operators across Germany, connecting dozens of cities. The business has sinc...
Oct 06, 2020•50 min•Season 2Ep. 45
Volantio launched into the aviation market in 2014, bidding to capitalize on a burgeoning need by airlines to embrace the digital world behind the scenes. The U.S.-based company, co-founded by Azim Barodawala and Fenn Baily, helps carriers automate their marketing, improve the passenger experience and, generally, bring their systems up to the level of other digital businesses. It has captured the attention of JetBlue Technology Ventures, Amadeus Ventures, Qantas and IAG. Customers include some o...
Sep 29, 2020•47 min•Season 2Ep. 44
Varun Khona's story about the creation of Headout is a classic startup tale. His first startup, Trippy, lasted a mere three years before he found himself with a big idea in 2014 to get in on what was then a burgeoning tours and activities sector. Hunkering down in New York City with a nascent business had a variety of challenges (he lived with a family relative for some time) but it was the relocation to India that allowed the company to focus and grow. Throw in an appearance on TV reality show ...
Sep 24, 2020•42 min•Season 1Ep. 43
How do you launch and grow a business that is attempting to overhaul one of the aviation sector's most complicated processes? The airline part supply chain is complex, has hundreds of customers and suppliers, and has to operate efficiently and without delays. Ben Frank, an ex-MIT graduate in aerospace engineering, created a startup to revolutionize that process with a platform that connects suppliers of parts to airline customers. The result is Rotabull , a New York, U.S.-based company that want...
Sep 16, 2020•35 min•Season 2Ep. 42
BlaBlaCar is a lot more than a carpooling platform with a quirky name. Since its creators - Frédéric Mazzella, Francis Nappez and Nicolas Brusson - thrust the brand onto the scene in the late-2000s, many companies have sought to mimic the idea but have failed to unseat the clear market leader. Regulatory issues, launches in new markets around the world, modest levels of funding (compared to, say, Uber) and expansive of the brand into new product lines, such as bus and coach transport, are all pa...
Sep 08, 2020•57 min•Season 2Ep. 41
