INDUSTRY OUTLOOK
Selfbook | December 09, 2022
Selfbook, a unique, comprehensive hotel payment software platform bringing direct bookings and modern payment technology to hotels worldwide, announced a strategic investment from Amex Ventures. The investment follows a $40 million Series A and A+ round led by Tiger GlobalThis announcement highlights Selfbook’s continuous growth within the hospitality space. As it continues to broaden its reach in the travel industry, Selfbook looks forward to working with American Express following this investment.
Selfbook enables hotels to offer guests a seamless, one-step checkout experience directly on their websites while elevating the user experience and streamlining the payment process for hotels, which can increase conversion and boost revenue. Selfbook also groups multiple services, such as restaurant reservations, spa appointments and activities, into a single payment flow to easily drive upsells.
“The American Express brand is synonymous with global travel and payment security, and we are thrilled to have Amex Ventures be part of our investor base, As hotels around the world continue to use Selfbook to offer a guest-first booking experience and secure payments, the investment from American Express will help us deepen our global presence and provide even more effective payment tools for our partners.”
-Khalid Meniri, Co-Founder and CEO of Selfbook
We are constantly on the lookout for innovative technologies that enhance and elevate the travel and payments experience,” said Margaret Lim, Managing Director of Amex Ventures. “We believe Selfbook is driving hotel bookings and payments into the future with their elegant checkout experience, intuitive user interface, and robust support for modern payment methods preferred by guests through a unified platform that seamlessly integrates with existing hospitality software.
About Selfbook
Uniquely positioned at the intersection of fintech and hospitality, Selfbook revolutionizes hotel bookings and payments from the inside out. Working in tandem with hotels’ existing technology systems, Selfbook enhances what matters most to hotels, including direct conversion, revenue, cash flow control, and security. Built by a team of hospitality veterans, Selfbook’s products provide a refreshingly effortless user experience for guests and hoteliers alike. Selfbook is committed to empowering hotels worldwide with modern e-commerce solutions tailor-made for our industry.
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TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY,INDUSTRY OUTLOOK
Fareportal | November 18, 2022
Fareportal’s prominence in the travel industry’s adoption of new distribution capability (NDC) to advance travel retailing is growing with its most recent integration of NDC with Amadeus, a leader in global travel technology and long-time partner of Fareportal.
The company behind leading online travel agencies CheapOair and OneTravel, Fareportal has been a front-runner in NDC integrations, with multiple airlines supported over the past few years. Amadeus has been a major driver of NDC since the technology standard’s inception and has heavily invested in retailing capabilities to enable this transition for our industry. Amadeus is live with NDC-enabled content in every region of the world and deeply committed to progressing NDC adoption and collaborating to unlock opportunities for value creation.
Fareportal is leveraging the benefits of the Amadeus Travel Platform to access NDC-enabled content. Among the advantages is the ability for travel sellers to search, compare, book, and service air content through one single platform. Amadeus currently is partnering with more than 20 airlines to distribute NDC-sourced content in the Amadeus Travel Platform. More than half of them are already making their NDC content available in Amadeus.
For the air traveler, the benefit of NDC comes in the form of enhanced retail offerings via a single platform. Passengers can access the full suite of products offered by an airline, all within the OTA’s digital ecosystem. Amadeus’ NDC-enabled solutions allow for complex servicing capabilities for NDC offers, which help streamline customer support, providing the ability to help those travelers who require post transaction service.
“Our partnership with Amadeus has continued to grow and expand over the years. This latest integration highlights the strength of its solutions and the benefit Amadeus provides to our brands, CheapOair and OneTravel.”
-Werner Kunz-Cho, Fareportal CEO
Sam Abdou, Executive Vice President, Airline Distribution, Search and Online, Amadeus, adds, “The fact that our long-term relationship with Fareportal continues to grow is a testament to the strength of our teams and their dedication to technology innovation. We believe that NDC is critical to the advancement of travel retailing and we are dedicated to driving its growth and success for the benefit of all players. Today’s announcement with Fareportal is significant given the role online travel agencies play in advancing NDC and accelerating its adoption around the world.
About Fareportal:
Fareportal is a travel technology company powering a next generation travel concierge service. Utilizing its innovative technology and company-owned and operated global contact centers, Fareportal has built strong industry partnerships providing customers access to over 500 airlines, a million lodgings, and hundreds of car rental companies around the globe. With a portfolio of consumer travel brands including CheapOair and One Travel, Fareportal enables consumers to book online, on mobile apps for iOS and Android, by phone, or live chat. Fareportal provides its airline partners with access to a broad customer base that books high-yielding international and domestic flight, hotel, and other travel and add-on ancillaries.
About Amadeus:
Travel powers progress. Amadeus powers travel. Amadeus’ solutions connect travelers to the journeys they want through travel agents, search engines, tour operators, airlines, airports, hotels, cars and railways. We have developed our technology in partnership with the travel industry for over 30 years. We combine a deep understanding of how people travel with the ability to design and deliver the most complex, trusted, critical systems our customers need. In 2019, we helped connect over 1.9 billion people to local travel providers in over 190 countries. We have a global mindset and a local presence wherever our customers need us. Our purpose is to shape the future of travel. We are passionate in our pursuit of better technology that makes better journeys. Amadeus is an IBEX 35 company, listed on the Spanish Stock Exchange under AMS.MC. The company has also been recognized by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the last ten years.To find out more about Amadeus, visit www.amadeus.com.
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TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY, DESTINATION AND TOURISM
Clinch and Sojern | October 12, 2022
Clinch, the leader in dynamic ad serving and personalization and creator of Flight Control, the omnichannel campaign activation platform, today announced a new relationship with Sojern, a leading provider of digital marketing solutions for travel, to bring enhanced workflow automation and omnichannel dynamic creative optimization (DCO) capabilities to travel marketers.
Clinch's platform Flight Control streamlines the process of building, serving and measuring complex, data-driven campaigns across all channels, which compliments Sojern's multichannel travel marketing platform. Travel marketers leveraging Flight Control can now leverage Sojern's travel insights to enhance creative decisioning and optimization strategies. Sojern has spent 15 years collecting, aggregating and analyzing literally billions of travel intent signals like hotel and airline booking data from thousands of travel brands around the world. This data rich environment, called the Sojern Traveler Ecosystem, is the foundation of Sojern's intelligent travel marketing platform that delivers unrivaled traveler insight, multichannel scale and automated optimization—all in one place.
"With personal and professional travel back on the rise, it's an incredibly important time for travel marketers to start evaluating and investing in technologies that support both their current and future needs, Trends and traveler circumstances are constantly changing on a hyper-local level around the world, therefore the ability to personalize and auto-optimize campaigns to match both environmental and user-based situations is paramount for this sector."
-Charel MacIntosh, Head of Business Development and Partnerships at Clinch.
Finding new ways to better serve our clients is truly at the heart of Sojern culture," said Josh Beckwith, Managing Director, Global Strategic Accounts and Partnerships. "We're excited to work with Clinch to put powerful tools in the hands of travel marketers to drive real performance.
To learn more about how Sojern and Clinch work together, contact info@clinch.co.
About Clinch
Clinch is the recognized leader in omnichannel personalization, campaign management and ad serving. The company's AI-driven dynamic personalization technology delivers custom-tailored ad experiences at scale across all channels, driving best-in-class performance and consumer intelligence. Flight Control, Clinch's Omnichannel Campaign Activation Platform, enables agencies and brands to manage the entire campaign lifecycle, from strategy through activation and measurement, on a single data-driven, automated platform that makes them massively more efficient, and profitable. Clinch campaigns run across all digital channels including programmatic, Connected TV (CTV), social media, in-app, native and Digital Out of Home (DOOH).
About Sojern
Sojern is a leading digital marketing platform built for travel marketers. Powered by artificial intelligence and traveler intent data, Sojern provides multichannel marketing solutions to drive direct demand. 10,000 hotels, attractions, tourism boards and travel marketers rely on Sojern annually to engage and convert travelers around the world.
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