The Future of Travel: How Emerging Players Are Driving Innovation
The travel industry is undergoing a digital-first renaissance. While incumbents play catch up, nimble startups are leading the charge in reimagining the end-to-end travel experience. These disruptors succeed through cutting-edge design, strong technical foundations, and obsession with the customer. At Manning + Company, we help the innovators of tomorrow build skilled teams across key roles in technology, product, and customer engagement.
Digital Innovators Set the Pace
Established online booking platforms and OTAs have grown complacent. Their sites and apps fail to inspire or fully address evolving traveler needs. This has opened the door for disruptive startups placing big bets on where travel is headed next:
Hopper - One of the world's fastest growing travel apps, Hopper pioneered innovations like price prediction algorithms and flexible booking options.
SimpleNight - A direct booking platform offering individualized hotels curated for design, amenities and location.
Selina - A co-living hospitality startup focused on building a global community of digital nomads.
Pruvo - An AI-powered booking platform that analyzes traveler preferences to make personalized recommendations.
These companies understand that today's travelers expect seamless digital experiences, unique offerings beyond big brands, and mobile-first engagement. Incumbents playing catch up simply can't recreate the DNA needed to lead in Digital Travel 2.0.
Building The Modern Travel Stack
Startups reimagining the travel experience succeed through strengths in key capability areas:
Customer Obsession - Deep insights into evolving traveler expectations, especially for younger demographics.
Design Excellence - Intuitive and engaging interfaces across web and mobile.
Data Architecture - Flexible stacks that enable personalization and optimization.
Engineering Strength - Modern codebases that can scale and support innovation.
At Manning + Company, our deep networks allow us to staff our travel clients with in-demand talent including:
- UX Designers fluent in best practices for travel apps and sites.
- Data Scientists to build recommendation and forecasting engines.
- Full Stack Developers to construct reusable services and APIs.
- Product Managers with both technical and design instincts.
We take an holistic approach, ensuring complementary skills that allow teams to execute at speed.
Fostering Traveler Connections
Beyond great technology, next-gen travel brands thrive through authentic customer engagement:
Customer Success - Developing personal relationships with travelers during and after trips.
Community - Facilitating meaningful connections between travelers via forums and events.
Social Impact - Showcasing sustainability credentials that resonate.
Partnerships - Aligning with brands that share target traveler values and aesthetics.
Our recruiting team identifies candidates across functions who live and breathe travel's experiential ethos. We tap growth strategists, community builders, sustainability experts and other roles to round out the modern travel stack.
The Journey Ahead
Personalization, convenience, and meaning - that's what today's travelers want. Incumbents are slow to reinvent decades-old business models. But the pace of change also represents a huge opportunity for those bold enough to dream bigger.
At Manning + Company, we're passionate about travel's future and the innovators shaping it. Let's connect to discuss how we can help assemble talent to bring that vision to life - and transform travel for the better.