Five Travel Startups for Businesses with Mobile-Obsessed Customers
This week’s roundup of travel startups looks at mobile apps that help attractions engage visitors tied to their mobile phones, businesses understand the importance of Wi-Fi, and private pilots make money off frustrated business travelers.
There is also a hotel software designed for properties in emerging markets and a well-designed app for miles junkies.
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>>Onefeat is a San Francisco-based social gaming company that creates photo challenge apps. It recently started designing apps that allow attractions like zoos, museums, and cities to create customized photo challenges or interactive scavenger hunts for their venues. Users can win prizes, unlock facts about a place, and share the photos on social media.
SkiftTake: The apps are a win-win that give visitors a fun way to experience an attraction and venues a way to interact with and provide information to guests, without having to compete with mobile phones.
>>Flying is an iPhone app designed to log users’ flights, alert flyers about delays and cancellations, and reward users with stamps for mileage milestones. Users can connect their social accounts to the app to compete with friends’ logged miles or track their travels.
SkiftTake: Beautifully designed, Flying is an app for travel junkies that pay scrupulous attention to miles milestones and travel feats. It’s not a necessary tool, but a nice-to-have toy for frequent flyers.
>>This WiFi Sucks is a free iOS app that allows users to anonymously rate the Wi-Fi in public places. Business travelers and laptop workers can consult the app for the best network. Businesses including hotels, airports, and restaurants can use the startup’s data to monitor the effectiveness of their Wi-Fi networks.
SkiftTake: Today, Wi-Fi plays a part in which businesses consumers patron. Anyone working on the road will appreciate the ability to quickly find the best network, when it’s available, and businesses can get a sense for how important a strong connection is to their customers.
>>FlightHike will soon launch a marketplace that matches flyers with private pilots for short-haul flights up to 1,000 miles. It can be described as an Airbnb for air travel in that it allows the public to access flights for less money, while driving revenue to individuals rather than businesses. FlightHike plans to charge a booking fee.
SkiftTake: Anyone who has flown between nearby cities for business recently will be interested in FlightHike’s coming launch.
>>Bookiwoo is a cloud-based hotel management service designed for small to mid-sized hotels in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. The software allows hoteliers to manage inventory and rates across their website, Facebook page, and online booking sites.
SkiftTake: Although Bookiwoo shares few details on its software online, an easy-to-use management software that allows hotels to accept online bookings with relatively little hassle is much needed in many markets where online booking is just starting to emerge.