5 Travel Startups Reimagine Travel Necessities for Mobile Platforms

Each of this week’s startups reimagine travel necessities from tracking business expenses and getting flight refunds to touring cities and museums for today’s more mobile and digital reality.

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>> Trippeo is a booking and expense solution that targets millennials and digitally-savvy business travelers. The platform manages expenses in real time, gives travelers incentives to remain within budget through a points system, and allows travelers and their employers to see big-picture analytics.

SkiftTake: Trippeo’s mobile-based expense management system will make tracking and reporting costs easier for modern business travelers and therefore make them more likely to use the system than look outside corporate tools for travel.

>> Must See is a platform for creating, selling, and buying mobile audio guides to museums, exhibitions, neighborhoods, and cultural institutions. The platform provides the technology for these attractions to create their own apps and set their own prices. Visitors can then download the guide or app directly from the MustSee platform.

SkiftTake: A mobile app or mobile-friendly website is a necessity for all attractions today, creating a market for relatively low-cost or low-skill creation platforms like MustSee. The next step is marketing the app to potential and upcoming visitors.

>> Inside Travel Guides are three-day city guides written by locals. Each guide is $10 and designed to be read on a mobile device. The site launched this month with itineraries for 17 U.S. and international cities.

SkiftTake: Inside’s itineraries will appeal to a younger traveler demographic looking for cheap mobile guides with good local tips, but they will still need to compete with the review sites and free articles already online.

>> Set for Service is a reservations operations systems. Its goal is to make all offline conversations and informational available online so that they can be accessed by any employee inside or outside the restaurant.

SkiftTake Restaurant technology is an innovative space right now and companies are continually developing tools, outside of review platforms, that boost restaurants’ bottom lines and customers’ experiences.

>> Airbay is a platform for reselling airline tickets that current holders can’t receive full refunds for. The platform wants to provide discounted tickets to buyers looking for an alternative to full-priced tickets.

SkiftTake: The site is more of a concept than a reality at this point and the name change will likely spark fees that mitigate the savings of a second-hand ticket.