STARTUP STAGE: BookSmart24 helps travelers book sustainable trips

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

BookSmart24 is a global travel booking app focused on making travel more sustainable by helping travelers find the most climate-friendly itinerary. We use technology to compare and analyze travel options, giving consumers the information they need to make the right choices.

Until humanity reduces its emissions to zero, global warming will continue to increase. Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases must be reduced. BookSmart24 has started with flights and will expand to trains and all other types of mobility, combining them in the most efficient way. BookSmart24 is a private, independent company with shareholders from the United States and Europe. The company operates from Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain with German management and global cooperation partners.

Our vision is to soon become the leading global reference portal for sustainable travel.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

BookSmart24 addresses the need of travelers worldwide to obtain better information on how to make more sustainable travel booking decisions. We have developed a solution that assesses the environmental impact of travel routes in real time. This functionality is integrated in a state-of-the-art booking app and allows users to compare and understand emissions (sustainability) versus price and travel duration at a glance. Users often find that traveling between the origin and destination of their desired route can be much more environmentally-friendly (often up to 35% less CO2), with no major drawbacks in terms of price or travel time.

Currently BookSmart24 offers this for flights. As a next step, we will include high-speed trains and combine rail and flight legs to offer sustainable intermodal mobility.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company. 

• Strengths: We have profound knowledge of the global travel industry and extensive experience in the online travel sector. Our technical expertise allows us to plan, develop and deploy the most challenging functionalities and applications. All our software and databases are proprietary. We connect with technical universities to enhance the quality of our processes and to improve logics and algorithms. We partner with the world’s leading global distribution systems as well as other providers and aggregators in the online travel space.
• Weaknesses: Raising capital has proven to be more complicated than expected.
• Opportunities: Online travel is a huge growth industry, and we aim to make BookSmart24 the leading global site for sustainable travel bookings and digital multimodal mobility. We will aggregate and integrate the inventory of leading high-speed rail providers worldwide and map out sustainable travel itineraries. Many short- and medium-distance travel routes to international hubs can be covered by rail without significant time or price disadvantage, and the CO2 savings are huge. Intermodal mobility (train combined with plane) for long distances will be combined with urban multimodal mobility concepts. This will enable users to create complete sustainable door-to-door itineraries worldwide. The goal is to help travelers save millions of tons of CO2 emissions by providing them with the relevant information and booking applications to make informed choices.
• Threats: There is competition. Other providers will start offering similar concepts which may affect the pace of growth and success of BookSmart24.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

We are living in a fast-changing world. Global warming and the need to save energy and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions have become a priority for societies and governments worldwide. Global warming is an undeniable fact. Some say it is too late to stop or reverse the global warming threat. But with the right approaches and projects, we believe that we can contribute to buy humanity some time.

It is undisputed that travel adds to global warming and causes substantial CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions that harm the environment. In many countries people are uncertain whether they can reconcile taking a flight with their conscience; the term “flight shame” was coined in 2018 to describe the unease about flying experienced by eco-conscious travelers.

BookSmart24 helps travelers find the most climate-friendly way to travel. We use technology to compare and analyze travel options, so consumers have the information they need to make the right choices.

So you’ve got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We are actively using social media to draw attention to BookSmart24 and to drive traffic to our websites. These campaigns will be intensified in the future, and we will work with high-impact influencers with industry affinity to ensure that the BookSmart24 message goes viral via TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

We are also pursuing proactive worldwide PR coverage through all available media and channels.

Tell us what process you’ve gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

With profound background knowledge and experience in the global online travel industry, we examined where this market would be turning after the COVID-19 standstill. It was clear that industry players and consumers would not simply continue the generic “cheap flight” argument, but that the market needed value-added content, messages and offerings. Sustainability is a clear signpost for both industry and consumers, and we have made it our mission to make it simple for travel bookers to identify which means of travel is less polluting compared to another. And we do this in a very transparent way and make it instantly bookable.

How and when will you make money?

Similar to the business model of conventional online travel agencies, we make money from a combination of transactional commissions, service fees, markups, GDS incentives and marketing incentives from featured suppliers. We expect to have positive cash flow in our second year of operation.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

The founding team has many years of in-depth experience in the global travel industry, particularly in online travel booking, travel technology and IT, and global sales and marketing.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We strongly support the principles and practices of diversity and inclusion. With a small but growing team, our collaborators comprise people of different generations, backgrounds and cultures; professionals from seven different countries across four continents have contributed to BookSmart24. With a global project and a multicultural mindset, we will continue on this path and are excited about growing our team in this way.

What’s been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Getting investors on board at the right time.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

The world is looking for more sustainable mobility to reduce the environmental impact of travel. Yet travelers do not know how to find, select or book more sustainable and competitively priced travel options. BookSmart24 offers the solution.

We are first to market with our unique “SmartChoice” recommendations based on proprietary algorithms, multimodal mobility on a global scale and our global high-speed rail aggregation (phase two).

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We trust that one year from now we will have reached full global scale and will help travelers to find the most sustainable travel itineraries to save the world one million tons of C02 emissions.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

IPO or outright sale of the business.