SevenRooms has received investment from Amazon’s Alexa fund to develop voice-enabled technology for restaurants. The company, which specializes in front-of-house technology, will use the Alexa Skills Kit to develop a skill enabling restaurants to incorporate voice into day-to-day operations. The skill could include the ability for waiting staff to…

Social travel network Mapify has raised $1.3 million in seed funding. Investment for the Berlin-based startup comes from a number of funds and angel investors including Switzerland-based Ennea VC and Los Angeles-based LayJax Ventures. Mapify was launched in late 2017 to improve the travel experience through a social platform….

It’s been quite a year for Klook and GetYourGuide – both in terms of their individual strategies and the changes taking place in the tours and activities sector that they operate in. Klook is now the most heavily funded tours and activities startup in history, notching up just under…

Metasearch dates back to 1999, when both SideStep and FareChase launched as search engines that aggregated prices from other online sites. The following years saw many additional entrants into the metasearch arena – some created with that specific purpose, such as Skyscanner (2001), Kayak (2004) and Wego and Trivago…

One of the central tenets of the Power Paradox in travel is how some of the biggest brands ever assembled in the industry “have aggregated the content, established the trust and amassed the war chests to defend against upstarts.” This scenario is no more apparent than in the influence…

Northstar Travel Group has acquired tnooz and its related assets as part of a plan to further accelerate development of Phocuswright’s fast-growing PhocusWire media property. Tnooz will be merged with PhocusWire over the course of the remaining months of 2018, with its content archive, many of its signature products…

IATA’s 2018 Global Passenger Survey (GPS) included insights on passenger preferences to manage disruption, offering compelling reasons why airlines and airports should aim to eliminate queues through self-service and automated options, even opening up the opportunity for airlines to profit if they handle disruption effectively. According to the over…

Flight comparison website Kiwi.com is relaunching its Travelling Salesman Challenge for 2018, after more than 250 teams entered the competition last year. The competition tasks coders with finding the cheapest route between particular regions, using data supplied from Kiwi.com. Entries are made online and the winning team’s algorithm will be…

Boost, a startup providing a mobile learning platform for the hospitality industry, has announced that École hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) has invested in the business. In a statement, Rémi Walbaum, chief innovation officer at EHL, said: “Innovation is one of our core values, and today in 2018 we see technology as…

Kayak has announced a new partnership with quicket.io which will make flight amenities data available to customers on flight search, across all the metas which fall under Booking Holdings’ Kayak unit. Munich-based Quicket operates as a software-as-a-service provider specializing in the distribution of airline cabin configuration and added services…