tripAbrood founders: Ketan Anand, Alexa-Maria Rathbone Barker and Vic Walia.
Travel start-up building an AI-powered virtual family travel assistant.
tripAbrood, a new travel business set on reinventing the online family travel experience, has opened its pre-seed funding round. The three co-founders, Alexa-Maria Rathbone Barker (formerly European Head of Analytics for Bloomberg), Ketan Anand (formerly Engineering Lead at Lloyds Banking Group) and Vic Walia (formerly VP Global Brand Marketing at Expedia Group) are seeking funding to build the world’s first ‘virtual family travel assistant’ – an AI-driven travel platform that will revolutionize the way families discover and book holidays.
tripAbrood’s AI-led travel assistant is focused on tackling the most complex area of online travel- family holidays- and will reinvent the current standard booking flow into a highly personalised discovery journey. This journey, led by machine learning, will enable tripAbrood to deeply understand the complexities of each customer’s interests and desires for their next holiday, and will use advanced AI technologies along with recommendation engines to match them accurately to the best option to fit their individual needs.
tripAbrood’s goal is to provide busy families with fewer but more relevant holiday options whilst streamlining and simplifying the whole process. These families often struggle to find the holiday they want, or default to a similar break year on year, as it is too difficult to find something that is new and that they feel confident will be right. They are families that are used to booking holidays online, but who are often frustrated by the overwhelming number of options they are presented with. tripAbrood will make the experience of finding a family holiday online more fun and intuitive, reducing the amount of research time it takes to find a suitable holiday and giving families the confidence that they have found the right holiday for them, every time.
The concept of tripAbrood came from Alexa-Maria Rathbone Barker in 2018, who struggled to book the kind of holidays that she, her husband and three young children wanted, especially when both her and her husband were working parents. She comments:
“As a busy working mum with three children, I remember spending hours fruitlessly searching for the right family holiday for my specific needs. I wanted an online solution to help me find what I was after quickly and efficiently. Thinking it should be much less stressful to research family holidays I decided to tour the country and see if I was alone in my assumption. After interviewing families across the UK and hearing the same stories time and again, I realised it was not just me and that there was a real gap in the market. The right solution however, needed a fresh perspective and building from the ground up. To do this I needed a tech-savvy team willing to radically shake things up.”
Alexa’s founding team brings together over 30 years of experience from industry leading technology companies, with extensive expertise in tech, travel and data, and a single focus of creating a truly online travel agent focused on families.
Ketan Anand is a technology leader with experience in both start-ups and large enterprises, most recently as an Engineering Lead in Lloyds Banking Group, which has over 30 million customers. Being a Dad of a 2-year-old, he wants to leverage his expertise at building scalable solutions and growing high-performing teams to create an industry-leading platform that transforms how families travel, leveraging data insights, seamless user experience, and Artificial Intelligence."
Vic Walia brings a wealth of travel industry and brand building experience to tripAbrood, having spent the last 12 years in online travel, most recently as VP Global Brand Marketing at Expedia Group. While working at Expedia Group, Vic was also responsible for scaling the Hotels.com business. Vic is a father of two and knows first-hand the struggles that families face. He brings his OTA expertise to tripAbrood with a mission to make family travel as frictionless as possible.
Alexa’s own experience is from Bloomberg, the world’s leading financial data provider, where she worked for 10 years, most recently as the European Head of Analytics. She ran $200 million+ revenue generating businesses that sold data-driven technology solutions to the world’s largest financial institutions. Alongside this, she has sat on the board of several children’s welfare charities.
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She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication & Mass Media from Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens and she has been editor and editor-in-chief in various economic magazines and newspapers.
