As a startup in this space, it is impossible to compete dollar for dollar with these brands. Travel is one of the most competitive industries to build a consumer brand with the major players spending billions on marketing annually. We have aggressive growth targets for 2019 and will continue to establish our leadership position with this new funding.
450% growth from 2017!ĭespite the success we have had in 2018, we are barely scratching the surface of the $500 billion hotel booking industry.
SnapTravel has driven over $50MM USD in sales in 2018 over messaging. Customers from 150+ countries have booked a hotel on SnapTravel - SnapTravel customers have booked over 350,000 nights at 35,000 different hotels across 5,800 cities. Over 2 million users have had a conversation with SnapTravel in the past 2 years. We also continue to innovate in the voice space, building unique integrations with Amazon Alexa and re-thinking how voice can work in conjunction with visual devices. The majority of our traffic and booking volume comes from messaging interfaces such as SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Apple Business Chat. SnapTravel allows customers to book great hotel deals over conversational interfaces. For SnapTravel, it is the now! SnapTravel Success As interactions between consumers and brands grow over messaging channels, the logical extension will be to enable customers to conduct commerce as well.įor most companies, driving commerce over messaging is the future. Building up this ‘marketplace’ takes time, but something that will inevitably happen. Businesses will invest in chat when there are enough consumers looking for them on these channels. Consumers will proactively look to chat with businesses over messaging when they are confident the business they are looking for will provide a rich conversational experience. However, there is still a long way to come. SnapTravel product screenshots over Facebook Messenger Businesses are starting to catch up with over 300,000 active bots on the Facebook Messenger Platform, and 8 Billion messages exchanged between people and businesses every month. In addition to chatting with family and friends, consumers expect that they can chat with businesses within their favorite messaging app. Consumers spend a disproportionate amount of time on messaging apps vs non-messaging apps. There are 149.8MM mobile messaging app users in the US, 2 billion globally, and these numbers continue to grow. The consumer trend towards messaging is here. SnapTravel is their third investment ever. SC30 is run by Bryant Barr - his long-time friend and business partner. (the company that manages Curry’s investment, brand partnership, media and philanthropic interests). This investment was made through SC30, Inc. Stephen Curry (SC30) - Stephen Curry is an NBA superstar (3x NBA champion, 2x MVP, 5x All-Star). They operate a $500M USD venture fund ( Telstra Ventures) based out of San Francisco. Fazal sold his Facebook advertising business AdParlor to AdKnowledge, while Shi developed college-campus social site uMentioned and was an engineer at Google.įazal has written a detailed "how we got to where we are" post for Medium, in which he reveals, among other things, the importance of continuous testing, referencing as an example.Telstra Ventures - Telstra ( TLS.AX) is Australia’s largest telecommunications company. SnapTravel was founded by "repeat tech entrepreneurs" Hussein Fazal and Henry Shi. #Snap travel series#
Its statement said that existing investors Lightbank, BeePartners and Hedgewood took part in the Series A, with Expedia Inc board member Peter Kern also joining as a strategic investor. Hotels are sourced either direct with the property or via partners such as Expedia,. The business uses a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to automate search queries and bookings, with a team of human agents on hand 24/7 when needed. At this year's Facebook developers' conference f8 it announced a chat extension to its Facebook offer. SnapTravel launched on Facebook Messenger just over a year ago and has generated more than $1 million in revenues so far. The funding will be used to "double down on technology and to fuel growth." Toronto-based SnapTravel, which allows users to search and book hotels via Facebook Messenger and SMS, has secured a Series A funding round worth $8 million, led by iNovia.
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