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Looking for a place to go on your summer holiday? Travel tech startups throughout Europe can help you find your ideal destination, and plan your perfect trip. From startups uncovering Europe’s hidden gems, to social networks that allow you to connect with other travellers and document and share your travels, and trips with a medical or educational purpose, these 10 startups will surely have something for you:
Based in Brussels, itinari’s goal is to bring travellers to off-the-beaten-track destinations. Itinari features thousands of exclusive travel stories, written by more than 50 local European experts to unveil all the best kept travel secrets in more than 40 countries across Europe, and now available in eight languages. Articles include very niche topics like horseback riding in Kazakhstan, visiting an 8,000 year old sanctuary in Bulgaria where Thracian tribes worshipped the sun god, or discovering a Parisian pet cemetery. Additionally, itinari offers B2B solutions for travel and tourism businesses that need qualitative content to attract and satisfy customers. Founded in 2017, itinari has raised €830k over two rounds.
Founded in 2017 and based in Berlin, Mapify is a social platform for globetrotters, where they can find, plan, and record their travel experiences. On its website and app, travellers can upload pictures, make a map of their travels, create a bucketlist, plan their trips, and follow other travellers that share similar interests. Since launch, the startup has attracted users worldwide to share trips and spots in over 190 countries, and has already raised $1.5 million from MIT’s Sandbox Innovation Fund and private investors.
Ferryhopper – Greece is known for its many mythic islands, and now there’s a startup that lets you easily explore them. Based in Athens, Ferryhopper works with 39 ferry companies to allow you to seamlessly book ferries and go island hopping throughout the Mediterranean, with 160 destinations across four countries – Greece, Turkey, Italy, and Spain. Aside from letting you book tickets to one or multiple destinations, Ferryhopper’s platform provides full trip information, including the length of the journey, travel tips, and descriptions of its many destinations. Founded in 2016, the startup has so far raised a round of €600k.
Looking for a fun way to discover a new city? Download Questo, a mobile app that turns any city into an exploration game. With Questo, tourists can explore cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome or Berlin by solving clues in order to discover new places and stories about them. Each quest is based on a specific theme, which can be inspired by a movie, a book, a historical fact, or a local legend. Founded in 2017 in Bucharest, the app is already available in 40 cities, and over 35,000 people have already completed “quests”. In February 2019, the startup raised a seed round from two angel investors, and we included it on our list of Romanian startups to look out for in 2019.
Heal2Go – A range of medical services from dental care to plastic surgery might be very expensive in your country, and surprisingly low cost in others, leading to the burgeoning medical tourism industry. Heal2Go is a medical tourism startup that connects you with the treatments you need in the right destinations. On its platform you can find treatments abroad, compare prices, read reviews and book appointments online for everything from dental implants to fertility treatments, sleep medicine, neurology, hip replacements, and even butt implants. Founded in 2018 and based in Amsterdam, Heal2Go has raised €119.6k to date.
Tourlane is a growing travel tech platform to help you plan your perfect holiday. Founded in 2016, the Berlin-based startup is a full service online travel agency, combining technology and data with professional travel consulting to create personalised, multi-day getaways. The company works directly with service providers to offer customers flights, accommodations, tours, activities, and transfer options all in one place, and its platform provides real-time pricing, availability, instant trip visualisation, and drag-and-drop adjustments to make multi-day trip planning easy. The startup just raised $47 million in May 2019 to spur its international growth, and we featured it as one of our German startups to watch in 2019.
Based in Ghimbav, Romania, bmy.guide bills itself as ‘the first social network for travel and tourism’. Its all-in-one social platform was created with the intention of connecting travellers with each other, and changing how they plan, book, journal, and share their trips online. Users create and share ‘postcards’ of their travels, which can range from simple photos to full photo essays, allowing other users to discover new places, and can chat with each other to get tips and suggestions from other travellers who have already been to their destination of choice. Just founded in 2018, so far most of the users are based in Romania, but the platform is gaining traction with travellers throughout Europe.
Klazz wants ‘to revolutionise the mainly offline language travel industry by matching international students and domestic teachers’. Based in Berlin, Klazz’s website currently markets English language courses to Spanish, French, Italian, and German speakers traveling in London at a rate of about €60/half-day class. Klazz teachers are certified teachers and are background-checked and personally interviewed by Klazz. The startup raised $800k in an October 2018 pre-seed round, which it will use to expand to further markets and destinations.
Instaroom is a concierge platform that helps hotels to improve the customer experience and boost revenues by more quickly answering customer questions and requests. The platform offers a white-label messaging widget for hotel websites, secure payment functionality, multiple channel integrations, FAQ chatbots that automate 40% of responses, and provides statistics to help hotels optimise revenues and manage complex bookings. Instaroom was founded in 2017 and is based in Berlin.
Founded in 2017, Triporate is a business travel platform based in Madrid that uses AI to plan trips efficiently, saving companies both money and time. Businesses can simply send Triporate an email specifying what they need, and the startup will respond with personalised trip proposals that follow company policies. Companies then choose the most appropriate option, and can pay for multiple trips all in one bill. The startup has raised a total of €380k across two funding rounds.