tripAbrood, the only travel brand to feature in this year’s list, is launching to the public in August 2020, and promises to deliver the biggest travel disruption event in a generation, revolutionising the family-holiday booking experience for parents and their “broods” across the UK.  

The brand targets the complex family market which is driven by new and more sophisticated holiday demands and by tech-savvy parents who are increasingly frustrated by the time it takes to find the right break for them. In a post-Covid era, trust will be more important than ever before, and tripAbrood’s focus on quality, speed and reliability feeds directly to the needs of travel-hungry but safety-alert families of today. 

Created by co-Founders Alexa-Maria Rathbone Barker (CEO) and Ketan Anand (CTO), tripAbrood has built an online experience via an AI-powered digital travel assistant called Aita (pronounced Ay-ee-ta), who replaces the need for a live travel agent by matching families to their ideal accommodation choice in minutes.  Powered by machine learning, Aita is deliberately conversational, a critical ‘personality-trait’ (cited as necessary by 93% of testers) in helping guide parents to the right choice as quickly as possible.

Beta-tests of tripAbrood’s revolutionary platform have seen families cut their search to booking time from 30 hours to 10 minutes without compromising satisfaction levels.  86% of users who used tripAbrood during its testing phase said they would book with them.

Alexa-Maria Rathbone Barker, CEO, comments: “The whole team is thrilled that tripAbrood has been included on such a prestigious list, a list which has featured such household names as Monzo, Revolut and PensionBee in the past. To be the only travel brand to make the 2020 list, given all the challenges that this year has thrown at the travel industry, makes the recognition all the sweeter.

“We are building our virtual travel agent to match and exceed any real travel agent in the family travel space.  With access to hundreds of thousands of properties across the world, and learning more with every interaction, the opportunities for our technology and what tripAbrood can achieve are manifold.  We know we will have the ability to match millions of families to their perfect holiday every day, and we cannot wait to launch in August and start our journey with families across the UK and beyond.” 

Ketan Anand, CTO, continues: "By using a blend of travel data insights, AI and our industry knowledge, we have been building tripAbrood from the ground up to create a totally new kind of family travel discovery experience, one we know fits the pace and needs of parents today. This allows us to build a product that combines the expertise and comfort of your friendly local travel agent and the scale and breadth of cloud computing.”

Daniel Tannenbaum, co-founder of TechRound added: "tripAbrood's concept demonstrates some real innovation in using AI with family travel to save people money and offer a more engaging user experience through the chatbots.  There is no doubt that both holidaymakers and businesses operating in the space will benefit from using and working with tripAbrood. The startup was chosen as a TechRound100 finalist as it ticked a lot of boxes for the judges and we are excited to see the company grow from strength-to-strength."