With so much focus on how the travel industry can open up safely for consumers, it is little surprise that many of the winners of the inaugural TravelScrum hackathon were solutions to address this area.
The three themes for the event were Health & Hygiene, Travel & Experiences and Sustainability & Relief.
Many initiatives centred on welcoming travelers back by ensuring the relevant checks and balances are in place in terms of ongoing travel restrictions, hotel hygiene and social distancing and mask wearing.
TravelScrum was also supported by 39 volunteers and 35 companies, such as Amazon Web Services, Amadeus, Turkish Airlines and Musement, who contributed in a number of ways including mentoring or provision to use their technology as part of the hack.
More than 400 registered for the hackathon, with 86 ideas submitted and 49 projects hacked.
The global award winner went to a team from Amsterdam-based corporate travel tech specialist Roadmap.
The team created Roadhack, a content-rich mobile application that could keep corporate travelers on the road in touch with their travel manager and ensure a safe experience.
Other awards were lifted by ATPCO, which won the Americas prize for its all-female team project that matches traveler preferences to destinations factoring in health and hygiene restrictions.
The EMEA gong went to Clean Hotel, a project enabling hotel operators to display their cleaning data via an SMS bot.
APAC had joint winners, going to Alma, from a team representing IBS Software, for its AI personalization solution that makes offers to travelers based on preferences and, Voyageur, a mobile app displaying CCTV videos of social distancing and mask protocol in enclosed spaces such as hotels, airports and attractions.
Exploreco won the Design Award for its virtual tours of wildlife conservation parks to highlight sustainable practices and allow travelers to help fundraising.
The People's Choice award went to VQ Check-in, an app aiming to alleviate queuing through QR code and text in order to check-in luggage.
The aim of TravelScrum was establish the hackathon and also a community that can continue to help the industry get on its feet again.
Co-founder Florian Mesny says the project is about the industry reinventing itself and "finding solutions for its future development through information, education and skills building."
He says that the next steps are to consolidate all the feedback from the event, which ran from the 11 to 14 June, and then use the community to decide on events and other opportunities going forward.
* A YouTube playlist of all the entries is available here.