The companies making the biggest impact in travel and hospitality this year are easing long-standing travel pain points by creating technology—chatbots, search engines, and booking tools—that provides one thing that all travelers crave: flexibility. “There’s a lot of anxiety around rising travel prices and binding bookings, especially after COVID,” says Ulrike Gretzel, a senior research fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, who specializes in the use and impact of emerging technologies. “These new tools are saying, We’ve got you. We acknowledge your problem, and we’re here to try and help you.”
One such tool is Hopper, one of Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2024, which offers a popular flight-booking app that leverages AI to alert travelers to flight price drops and offers an arsenal of travel-booking tools such as “Price Freeze” and “Cancel for Any Reason.” The company’s Hopper Technology Solutions (HTS) business arm is partnering with traditional travel providers, such as Capital One and Air Canada, to give their customers these booking tools, offering unprecedented flexibility for major airline and banks’ reward websites. Capital One’s investment of $96 million in HTS also speaks to the wave of industry giants that are turning to nimble tech startups to build creative and meaningful customer solutions.
Then there’s Point.me, a search engine and concierge service that singles out the best flights to purchase with your miles and points by looking across 33 loyalty programs on more than 150 airlines. “Travelers get excited to earn points but often find it’s very difficult to use them,” says Gretzel. So difficult, in fact, that an estimated $30 billion worth of points go unused every year. “Technology that helps people utilize these hard-earned points gives them a huge sense of accomplishment,” she says. Veteran companies are again taking notice: Like Hopper, Point.me has white-labeled its technology and recently announced a partnership with American Express that gives cardholders free access to a suite of Point.me’s flight-finding tools.
Problem-solving AI innovations are also emerging to tackle travelers’ pain points, from online travel agencies that have trip-planning chatbots to back-of-the-house hotel software that stands in for front-desk staff. One company that secured a spot on our list of the most innovative companies in travel was publishing house Matador Network for its chatbot GuideGeek. Unlike other travel chatbots, this one lives where travelers are already spending their time: on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. It’s chiefly popular for its impressive travel tips-on-the-go, similar to texting a friend for local intel. But unlike most friends, GuideGeek responds in seconds.
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