5 New Travel Startups Target Travelers’ On-the-Ground Experience

Two of this week’s startups focus on travelers inside cities and aim to improve their safety and spontaneity while exploring urban areas. The other seek to improve the booking process by making payment and flight choice easier to navigate.

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Beck & Score is a travel concierge service for affluent sports fans. The World Cup is the startup’s first event and it’s selling premium packages that include private transportation, chefs, and sports stars — in addition to game tickets.

SkiftTake: Beck & Score is selling a luxury product to a younger demographic and will need laser-focused marketing to find enough travelers to make the extraordinary trips profitable.

DealScoopr is a Seattle-based startup that finds flights based on the users’ personal preferences and past travel experiences. Last week the startup announced a partnership with Skyscanner that will give DealScoopr users the ability to book flights on Skyscanner’s API.

SkiftTake: Travelers search up 38 travel sites before purchase making it unlikely that they will rely on a single site to choose their destination and airline. Although DealScoopr might become of one the sites that travelers search, it will not be a one-stop shop.

Mappsafe is a crowd sourcing app that maps and shares street safety in an effort to increase awareness and work towards improved surveillance and lighting. Users rate routes based on their lighting, people, pathways and overall security.

SkiftTake: Travelers can easily get lost in new cities and a real-time app that alerts them of suspicious activity or generally unsafe areas could be key to better informed urban exploration.

Kamino is a mobile app that outlines walking itineraries in specific city neighborhoods. Users can either create or search for tours designed around a certain theme in their area.

SkiftTake: The self-guided tours are short and free making them useful for tourists or locals looking for something to do with little notice or planning.

SplitVR is a platform making it easier for groups of friends or families to book vacation rentals online. Users can search for rentals in Lake Tahoe, Breckenridge and Keystone and then send emails requesting commitment from interested parties. The rental is not booked until a designated number of users commit.

SkiftTake: SplitVR makes renting a vacation home more affordable by not placing the burden of a down payment on a single organizer, an increasingly necessary feature today with most young travelers already accustomed to instant virtual payments.