4th May 2023 - The new B2B travel experience platform Turneo drastically simplifies how hotels and other travel brands offer and manage in-destination experiences.
In-destination experiences remain the single most elusive opportunity in travel. For travellers, they represent the highlight of their holiday; the very reason they want to travel at all. Yet for travel brands, they pose an operational nightmare. Thanks to a lack of digital infrastructure, the $250B experience market remains overwhelmingly offline, complex, and expensive to offer. This is becoming an ever-growing problem, as more and more travel brands are looking to use experiences to differentiate their offering (so-called Experiential Hospitality).
Turneo’s B2B travel experience platform changes that. It enables any travel brand to seamlessly connect to, recommend, and manage the full range of travel experiences: from transfers to tours, from adventurous hikes to relaxing retreats. Previously this type of technology was only available to the largest global players, but Turneo now gives these tools to everyone. Hotels, campsites, and travel brands now have a means of sharing their truly unique recommendations with travellers via a simple booking tool.
The plug-and-play solution can be seamlessly integrated across all customer touchpoints, including the new travel planning chatbots that will soon become standard amongst hotels and OTAs.
“By combining the incredible interactions of ChatGPT with the unique knowledge and insights of local travel brands, guests get what they value most: meaningful, immersive experiences, recommended by a local expert, without any hassle in booking” explains Matija Marijan, CEO and Co-founder of Turneo.
Historically, offering experiences created an operational headache for hotels and travel brands. Overstretched staff were left juggling in-house offers with third-party contracts, tracking availability in real-time, and staying on top of guest requests. Now, Turneo’s platform provides a one-stop shop that centralises the management of all third-party tour and activity providers, as well as in-house experiences. In this way, all experiences can be integrated into a single view for easier tracking of performance.
We want our partners to focus on what they do best, and we take care of everything else. The hotels, hostels, and campsites that we work with today have the most incredible stories to tell about their local area and the best insights into what their guests should do during their stay. Turneo is about providing the tools to help them deliver those experiences.
- Matija Marijan, CEO and Co-founder of Turneo
In addition to their API which can interact with OpenAI’s GPT models, Turneo also offers
no-code tools to build customer-facing experience stores in minutes.“Just as Shopify enables every entrepreneur to create an amazing e-commerce store, Turneo enables every travel
business to create a fully tailored experience store, without the need for tech investment and resources” explains Matija. This means hundreds of thousands of travel brands around the world can now access a wide range of local experience options, and sell them via an intuitive, digital platform.
With Turneo, we can flex to every stage of the journey. For smaller travel brands, just starting out, our set-up takes minutes and doesn’t require any complex or costly integrations. These partners often start selling within the week and are then in a position to innovate and scale. At the other extreme, major hotel chains have seen our solution drastically simplify their operations, whilst also offering a much more sophisticated and seamless guest experience.
- Fran Kauzlarić, Co-founder of Turneo
Turneo was founded in 2022 by Matija Marijan, previously Senior Director at Expedia’s B2B division, and Fran Kauzlarić, previously Innovation Lead at Brussels Airport. The platform is currently live with travel brands across the world, and the two founders closed their first funding round of £695,000 just earlier this year. The round was led by Ascension Ventures and Underline Ventures, with participation from Silicon Gardens and angel investors including Expedia and TripActions (Navan) executives.
To showcase the power of Turneo’s platform when combined with GPT, Turneo has created travel chatbot Marco, which acts as a virtual concierge giving hotel guests bookable recommendations of local experiences. You can sign up for a demo here.
