Travel Is Your Business – travel industry podcast

060 – Fernando Camara of Skyhour – The Gift of Flight

November 15, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:45 — 41.0MB)

The next-generation gifting platform offering a smart, easy way to gift air travel…

Fernando Camara, Co-Founder and CEO of Skyhour (creating the ultimate air travel currency that powers travel across platforms and industries), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

Gifting travel, inspiring friends to become better people, inspiring people to go to new places and get new points of view, make an impact in their lives, travel is the best thing you can do
How it started, a friend wanted to travel
$140B on gift cards and less than 1% is spent on travel
The goal of connecting giting and air travel industries
Offering flight hours for $60/hour, and the ability to apply to virtually any airline
The opportunity to crowdfund a flight
Being able to sell tickets without dates or destinations
Like creating a new currency
Getting around liabilities in some restrictions
The money goes to escrow accounts — if you don’t use the hours, the money goes back to person you gifted to
Works with Sabre for accessing the inventory of airlines
Being a JetBlue Technology Ventures portfolio company
Potential partnerships with hotel chains, clothing brands, etc.
Camara’s other companies in digital marketing, real estate, then told a friend about the Skyhour idea, and how he needed someone to help build product, and thinking about hiring agency and agency (which loved it so much, sold the company and brought best the guys in to work on it)
Why New York is the best place to launch company in the US
A $5.5M seed round, working on Series A
Raised an initial round starting with cold calls
Seasonality, ebb and flow—flight frequency varies but people give all year round
Dealing with gift card restrictions
Only make money when people book a flight
Time between buying and booking, prompting booking and re-gifting actions

059 – Tal Shalit of Betterez – RTM From the Ground Up

November 7, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:41 — 52.3MB)

Flexible, scalable cloud-based enterprise software solutions for the Reservation and Ticketing Management (RTM) space…

Tal Shalit, Founder & CEO of Betterez (a leading reservations and ticketing management solution specifically designed to address the needs of travel, transportation and admissions companies, and part of the JetBlue Technology Ventures portfolio) joins John Matson (VoyagerHQ) and Bess Chapman (JetBlue Technology Ventures) in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

How Shalit used to work with Porter Airlines
Learnings for bus industry – originally built a reservation system for small airlines
Customers bus brands
B to B, or B to B to C
End to end reservation system, and how acquiring brands
Selling the vision as assembling components
Omnichannel experience for operators
Getting going on any channel you need help with
An intelligent way to set it and forget it and adjust over time
An overlap for airlines
Potential for air to bus to cruise, seamless customer journey
Considering the volume of bookings and speed through any operator
How the bus industry doesn’t have the legacy infrastructure that airline or rail has — so you can leapfrog over that and jump to mobile and latest tech faster, big opportunity
The economic downturn has a positive impact on bus travel, although a downturn doesn’t stop people from moving and traveling
The bus of the future, experiences
An engine to sell tickets, reconciliation
RTM (reservation and ticket management) – many crossover opportunities, building something flexible, even for events, can get into the market even with attractions to medical equipment reservations

058 – Eric Bamberger of IgnitionOne – Consumer Insights in Hospitality

October 30, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:04 — 52.8MB)

Guiding consumer insights to build audiences, optimize marketing campaigns, collect data, and utilize life moments…

Eric Bamberger, SVP of Hospitality for IgnitionOne (an award-winning Customer Intelligence Platform enabling marketers to understand, value and engage with their customers in real-time), joins “Fashion Is Your Business” podcast hosts Pavan Bahl and Marc Raco on location at the IgnitionOne Summit in New York.

In this episode:

Data has always been important to travel and other lifestyle industries
Bigger companies operating with legacy systems, making consumer insights difficult
Department of hospitality, organizing data, making it effective with clients
IgnitionOne has a fundamental understanding of the customer journey
First party data – the data a company can personally aggregate from their site, most companies don’t even know what to do with this data much less integrating third party data
Connecting with CRM files
Starting with cookies, using tags, create a scoring algorithm
Processing in real time, which gives a leg up on others
Working primarily with enterprise customers, larger hotel chains
Reading macrotrends, such as oil and gas mining in Texas relating with a hotel occupancy standpoint, adjusting strategies to react on trend data
Messaging vs. using data to drive direct bookings
Loyalty is less important, more about saving money
IgnitionOne’s proprietary scoring algorithm, custom machine learning algorithm for each customer, get high accuracy prediction on propensity to convert, which then leads to bidding decisions
Platform, ads, the spend used defending brands—-generic type key words for searches
Everything can be an acquisition channel with the right conversion strategy
Ad experiences in personalization
Considering trends in social platform use related to driving spend and conversion, and searching for all inventory sources
The relevance of apps
New data impacts each consumer visit, various sources of info for strategy in connecting uniquely to that person
The wins in digital marketing that are possible with real effort

057 – Kelsey Recht of VenueBook – Right Space, Right Time

October 23, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:15 — 45.1MB)

Streamlining the interaction between event organizers and venues…

Kelsey Recht, CEO/Founder of VenueBook (a platform offering event venues that you can search, discover and book), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

A look at the meeting and events industry and what drives growth
Despite digital, no substitute for in-person meetings, companies are hosting more events, but the types are changing
Different ways people thinking about meetings, how the travel industry has to adapt to changing landscape
VenueBooks’s user acquisition
The influx of accidental event planners
Circumventing issues with inventory side
Becoming skilled at helping venues skew inventory toward what is most in demand
The attention to better experiences
A focus on top notch booking experience overall, a very sophisticated platform
How VenuBook conversion rate is at 20%
Availability and pricing are generally the biggest friction.
Transparent pricing helps
Customers are in the market 45 days in advance of event, booking around 30 days in advance
Traditional hotel chains have dropped commissions with the promise of better tech tools
Making it easier/faster to book event spaces for planners and venues
Venues are top of funnel
Spinning up in new cities and with new venues, helping people think of spaces as venue spaces, giving hotels ideas for selling inventory they wouldn’t think of

056 – Allison Daniels of Virgin – Traveling and Building a Better World

October 9, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:28 — 52.0MB)

Virgin and its mission of changing (travel) business for good…

Allison Daniels, Investment Manager at Virgin (a leading international investment group and one of the world’s most recognised and respected brands), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

Changing business for good
Taking mundane experience or pain point and turning it into something better
Making things better from sustainability to safety videos
Capital intensive investment strategy, legacy and opportunistic
Taking people to the next frontier
Virgin Voyages – new cruise business
Whensuper-expericed people live and breathe the Virgin ethos and lead a new initiative
A new way to cruise in a sector hungry for disruption, integrate health and wellness and a beautiful ship designed in part by known designers on land, making ship work for customers, technology plays a big part
A lot more to be revealed about the ships, and the ecosystem on how the ships are built and limited suppliers
How new technology and innovation can allow Virgin to make new experiences available
Opening more hotels, how fit in voyage ecosystem
Hotels have distinguishing elements making them feel very “Virgin”, such a club that makes it feel like a members club
All rooms are chambers
Ships can sail where the hotels are, an entire Virgin experience
Virgin loyalty program, and creating a structured Virgin ecosystem
Making venture investments into innovation that have synergy to the general Virgin portfolio such as Ring
How offerings are changing because you have to do better for the customer has lasted in the industry
People now know what Virgin stands for
Brands to admire

055 – Yannis Moati of Hotels by Day – Reimagining Hotel Revenue

September 8, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:39 — 58.1MB)

Day-use hotel rooms with early check-in as a hospitality marketing and revenue hack…

Yannis Moati, CEO of Hotels by Day (gives travelers a comfortable daytime hotel room for half the price of an overnight stay), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

The biggest opportunity hotel revenue management – the idea of reimagining a hotel
Revenue management is a new science, becoming complex
New orthodoxies in hotel revenue creation being developed regularly
Conversation has changed from disinterest to wanting to discuss
A niche play in nascent sector
Flexibility of hotel consumption, responding to an on demand society
A rigid check-in/out schedule doesn’t work for today’s society
Protocol, tech, marketing funnel to become more flexible one step at a time, because it’s a big operation
Hotels don’t see this as hourly play – more like a block of time
Types of hotels that Hotels by Day works with, segmenting customer base based on hotels they have
Sweet spot are 4 stars, then 3 stars, then 2 stars if they have a record of accomplishment
Customer acquisition is costly
A marketing hack to acquire new customers
Growing organically
Experience is the key in a day stay
Being on Shark Tank
Why Hotels by Day will be the winners by allowing hospitality to join when they are ready
Barely scratched surface of possible demand, giving it time to grow
Part of sharing economy, using idle space and making use of it in a different way
Technology doesn’t allow flexibility and agility to follow trends of modern society in hospitality, don’t have the right tools
And the reinvigoration of the soul by the sea
The main drive of being able to help people

054 – Chris Dankberg of Viasat – Chasing a 700mph Plane with WiFi

August 28, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:10 — 56.4MB)

The real story behind WiFi on flights with Viasat…

Chris Dankberg, who runs Partnerships for Viasat (a global communications company that believes everyone and everything in the world can be connected) joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

How Viasat is about solving really hard problems
Why WiFi is slow on flights
Prior to 5 years ago,ViaSat was about WiFi via satellite for government and private air services
People got used to texting and checking sites that were urgent for destination (weather, hotels, etc.)
The growth of market for Viasat’s tech , high capacity satellites over different frequency bands enabled differently, market wasn’t ready
Why WiFi on planes is so expensive
Allocating capacity on an as-needed basis
Unprecented bandwidth economics
The abiity that you could hand off seamlessly from ground to air started being palatable
The opportunity waited for Viasat to launch a satellite
Demand wasn’t forecasted correctly, so there wasn’t enough supply for demand
Started with business travelers with expense accounts
Battery life on laptops got better, people started using phones
Something not considered was that the whole plane would use wifi
Tech is evolving, organizing data on what is important to customers how they used it
Second and third screen use and solving that need
Pain point – trains – slower with more tunnels, different angle to sky
On the early side of making online video streaming real with companies like Amazon
Disconnecting when traveling because of little kids demanding full attention
Trips that changed Dankberg’s life, created big decisions

053 – Thomas Sparico of Brand New Matter and Gillian Morris of HitList – Venture Capital in Travel

August 22, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:22 — 59.1MB)

The state of travel, the explosion of travel technology, venture capital, and the future of the industry from the perspective of investors in the travel space…

Thomas Sparico, Founder/Managing Partner of Brand New Matter and Gillian Morris, Founder of HitList [Episode 33] join John Matson, Bess Chapman, and guest host Brandon McKenzie for a MouthMedia Network Live event recorded in front of a live audience at Experience by Knotel, an interactive space located in the heart of Noho in New York City (666 Broadway) designed to showcase the experience of working in a flexible, adaptable, always energized environment. Sponsored by Knotel – Your agile business deserves an agile space. Knotel will find, customize, and operate your ideal office while you focus on your business. Discover more at www.knotel.com

In this episode:

The fundraising landscape in travel, how it feels like someone else is getting all the money
A lot of investors have been burned in the travel industry
Location matters such as NY vs. SF
Knowing where to look, right people to talk to
B-to-B, B-to-C , and is B-to-C is the graveyard?
Liking people, liking business, taking data drven justifiable approach
Developing strategic and meaningful relationships
What Brand New Matter looks for in a company and founders
Strategic vs. nonstrategic money
Taking dumb money and how it affects a cap table
Q and A

Thomas Sparico is the Founder & Managing Partner of Brand New Matter (BNM) Ventures. BNM Ventures invests in pre-seed and seed stage companies. His current investments include Leaflink, Bizly, VenueBook, Seatboost, AirportSherpa, LYNQ, Beachy and Buster. He is an advisor to several travel industry companies including Rocketrip and Curacity. Tom is a career entrepreneur, inventor, operator and investor with 22 years of experience. He was part of the founding team at priceline.com and a named inventor on over 100 patents at Walker Digital Corp. He was the founder and CEO of Internet Travel Enterprises, led the acquisition and turnaround of Hickory Travel and the turnaround and subsequent sale of ECS to Onyx Centersource.

Gillian Morris is the founder and CEO of Hitlist, named one of the 50 Best Apps of 2016 by TIME. Before entering the start-up world, Gillian worked as a consultant, journalist, and educator in Turkey, China, the Gulf states, and Syria. Her work has appeared in/on the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Buzzfeed, CNN, CNBC, TechCrunch, The Next Web, and LifeHacker. She is a proud mentor with the School of Leadership Afghanistan and Gaza Sky Geeks and serves on the board of Data4America, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank dedicated to bringing data and conversations to advance the understanding of policy.

052 – Ned Horneffer of Romeo Power Technology – Powering the Future of Travel

July 31, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:06 — 55.2MB)

Lithium battery-powered travel…

Ned Horneffer, Director of Business Development for Romeo Power Technology (creators of the world’s most energy-dense battery packs) joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studio powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

Romeo Power Technology is counting on that electrical is the future of transportation
Electrification will take over all forms of transportation, batteries tech will increase
The challenge of being able to retrofit vehicle with batteries
Startups can move quickly, they are really sold on lithium and electrification
Larger players, the secret is to find out how serious they are
Developing and getting a proof of concept for a fleet of vehicles
Regional transportation need so great, could affect regulation
Will technology affect consumer behavior, or will consumer need push technology development and adoption
Will people know how to handle it?
Flying cars
Influencing regulation as a brand
UL certification important
How battery power for aircraft can open up airports with noise restrictions
Marine sector is off and running
Norwegian strength
Battery-run cruise ships?
The danger of batteries and fires
Level of confidence in safety, tech is at a point that if you build batteries the right way they will never explode, single cell fault tolerance and pack construction avoid chain reactions
Punctures are a primary danger
Transportation is a means to an end
Appreciating the world is big when things go wrong with travel

051 – Travel Tech Infrastructure – Thinking Forward

July 27, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:10 — 45.0MB)

A fireside chat on innovation between representatives of two of the most forward thinking travel groups…

Photo credit: Eva Cruz, Crouching Tiger LLC

Rashesh Jethi (SVP Engineering for Americas & Head of Innovation for Airlines for the world’s largest GDS, Amadeus) and Bess Chapman (Operating Principal for JetBlue Technology Ventures) discuss travel tech infrastructure, innovation, and possibilities at the Travel Disruption Summit presented by Voyager HQ, and sponsored by Amadeus and Fareportal.

In this episode:

What AI means for the travel industry
How everything has changed with hyper-cheap hyper-computing
Used to depend on massive investments for AI, and now it simply requires a lot of data and smart people
How machine learning sit on top of that, what it means when airlines and other travel business starts really knowing customers
Machine learning is one discipline of AI, and it means you feed computer data, makes sense of data, make more personalized recommendations, much potential in marketing
How it is a challenge that many players are at different maturity in technology stacks
Many are moving to open APIs to encourage growth and innovation
Photo credit: Eva Cruz, Crouching Tiger LLC
Regulation issues an inhibitor to innovation, but most regulation is to keep us safe
Be respectful of regulation that’s there
GDPR an example
What it means that not all travel providers can keep up with changes at the same pace
Antiquated innovation all around
The biggest white space for disruption in airports
Why airports will be the malls of the future
Airports can be an oasis of commerce and relaxation
Prescreening and biometrics, making screening fast track, frictionless
Identifying you as a traveler, then providing you a contextual experience and a reference to what is available around you
Amadeus believes in tapping into the creative energy of anyone, supporting innovation
Overhyped technology (personal opinion) is blockchain
Bags as a huge white space, RFID, and more
How NDC change Amadeus’ current setup, and the next evolution in standard with a lot of interest from customers
AR and VR in the travel space, ideal use-cases, and why they could just become another screen we get used to
Using VR to book trips and for in-flight entertainment, shopping, training – and what are the challenges?
A lot of opportunity for companies to help other companies make money
What is looked for by Amadeus venture fund