When PhocusWire announced the 2022 cohort of Hot 25 Travel Startups, travel—and the world in general—was still in the process of reopening following the COVID-19 pandemic.
While funding plummeted 45% to $4.5 billion in 2020, annual funding for travel startups climbed to $12.5 billion in 2021, according to Phocuswright research, which dubbed the increase “a significant comeback.”
It was a more difficult year for startups in 2022, with investors taking a more cautious approach, but investment still reached roughly $14 billion over the course of the year.
Amid wider headwinds and tailwinds, several of PhocusWire’s Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2022 have logged major funding rounds in recent years.
In February, accessible travel platform Wheel the World closed its $11 million Series A round, including $3.5 million in fresh capital. Revenue management systems provider RoomPriceGenie secured $75 million in funding in February 2025, while Latin American corporate travel platform Onfly raised $40 million in a Series B round that April.
Some startups also closed their doors, including camper van startup Cabana and live video shopping platform Local Purse in 2023.
In 2024, short-term rental (STR) property management company Frontdesk shut down as well, laying off its 200-person staff after failing to raise funding.
Other startups were picked up by larger players, including airline revenue management system Kambr, which was acquired by Amadeus for an undisclosed amount in March 2022. A few months later, Atriis announced plans to acquire ReTravel, a cross-selling tech solution, and that November, Mangopay acquired Nethone, a Poland-based fraud protection company.
We checked in with a few companies from the 2022 cohort, asking them about recent highlights and plans for 2027.
Editor’s note: Some responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Vacayou
Vacayou is a content and booking platform for wellness and active travel. Its B2B arm, TripFusion, lets hotels offer golf, spa and wellness experiences as part of the room-booking experience.
2026 highlights
- Expanded TripFusion for Vacayou to solve golf travel issues, allowing golfers to book hotels, tee times and trip elements together instantly, while offering golf courses and resorts a new revenue stream
- Expanded partnerships in the golf travel ecosystem, including GolfNow/GolfPass, Troon and Lightspeed Golf, and many other partners, while enhancing connectivity across hotels, tee sheets and experience inventory
- Demonstrated strong early economics from golf packaging, with average booking values significantly exceeding traditional golf-trip bookings as travelers combine accommodations, golf and other components into a single transaction
- Expanded TripFusion from a booking engine to an intelligent commerce infrastructure and distribution layer, connecting hotel and ancillary inventory and enabling partners to sell complete experiences through their branded channels
- Continuing to develop a broader vision for experience-led travel, applying wellness and golf technology to a larger opportunity: making typically fragmented travel experiences dynamically bookable and distributable
What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?
Our biggest challenge and opportunity now is scaling our connectivity and distribution quickly to meet our partners’ needs, since we've proven the technology. As we grow, we aim to standardize integrations, speed onboarding and help large partners see travel as a complete experience, not just hotel rooms.
Where is AI is having the biggest impact on your business?
AI is transforming TripFusion at both the product and operational levels. We use AI to accelerate development and integrations, but the bigger opportunity lies in how travelers discover and build trips. Traditional travel search starts with a destination and a hotel. AI helps us understand intent and dynamically assemble relevant hotels, golf, spa and experiences from real-time inventory. Combined with TripFusion's packaging infrastructure, AI can move travel from static search results to personalized, dynamically bookable journeys.
Travala
Travala is a cryptocurrency-friendly travel booking service.
2026 highlights
- Surpassed $100 million in revenue: Achieved record-breaking revenue in 2025-2026 across all core travel verticals, marking the most successful financial year in Travala’s history
- Launched an AI travel protocol: Introduced an end-to-end agentic AI travel protocol for autonomous AI agents to search, plan and execute M2M (machine-to-machine) travel bookings
- New car rentals with crypto: Launched global car rentals with crypto across 50,000 locations, with givebacks and discounts for Smart members, directly supporting consistent monthly gross revenues exceeding $7 million
- Travala rebrand: Unveiled the new Travala logo and a full-scale rebrand to solidify our position at the intersection of Web3 and AI-driven travel.
What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?
The travel industry is undergoing its biggest structural transformation in decades, driven by rapid AI advances and shifting booking behaviors. For Travala, our core challenge is building the bridge between massive, fragmented global travel supply and next-generation AI and Web3 protocols. Moving fast enough to set the pace requires balancing rapid tech development with the high reliability travelers expect. We view scaling this infrastructure not as a hurdle but as an incredible opportunity to pioneer how the next generation of travelers and AI agents search, plan and pay for trips.
Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?
Earlier in Q2 2026, Travala launched the Travala Travel MCP enabling autonomous AI agents to search, book and pay for trips seamlessly. For travelers, this technology powers an AI travel concierge, starting with Claude, that compresses complex trip planning into a single conversation. With Morgan Stanley forecasting that agentic shoppers will drive up to 20% of online retail spending by 2030, Travala is building the universal standard for machine-led execution. By connecting global inventory directly to AI, we are replacing manual booking cycles with efficient, intent-based travel commerce.
Thrust Carbon
Thrust Carbon helps companies reduce costs and emissions generated by business travel.
2026 highlights
- The launch of our new behavioral change product, EngageAI. It identifies high-impact travel decisions before they happen, delivering personalized guidance through channels they already use, like WhatsApp or Teams.
- Our early pilots with enterprise clients have produced some outstanding results. Travelers consistently chose public transport over taxi when nudged at the right time (more than 40%!). Once scaled across a full travel program, EngageAI could deliver millions in cost savings and significantly reduce emissions.
- EngageAI has also had some great recognition in the industry being a finalist in the Innovation Faceoff at both Business Travel Show Europe and APAC, Achievement in AI Innovation at the Business Travel Awards Europe 2026 and a finalist for Travel Technology Innovator at the Business Travel People awards.
- And the product has grown rapidly. Our library of behavioral interventions has expanded to target leakage prevention, booking optimization and traveler engagement.
What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?
Shifting how the industry sees us. We've been “the sustainability company” for years. Of course, we still are; we just won Sustainability Team of the Year at the Business Travel People Awards for the second year in a row. But our focus has also expanded with our new product. We're changing traveler behavior that cuts cost and carbon at the same time, and we’re trying to get this message out to the industry.
Where is AI is having the biggest impact on your business?
In two places: our core product capabilities and our development speed.
AI powers our product. It allows us to process huge amounts of data to send the right message, to the right traveler, at the right time, all automatically. A few years ago, this would have been impossible.
On top of that, our product capability is expanding rapidly. A client can request a new nudge type at the start of the week and be trialing it by the end of the week. The speed at which the product can expand and improve client experience is both terrifying and exciting.
Onfly
Brazil-based Onfly provides corporate travel expense management technology.
2026 highlights
- Crossed 4,000+ active corporate clients, with GMV growing 75% year over year toward our 2026 target of about 2.4 billion Brazilian reais (roughly $470 million)
- Corporate card TPV surpassed about 500 million Brazilian reais (roughly $100 million, representing 130% of growth year over year).
- Mexico, now in its second year of operation, will close the year with 100 clients and already represents 3% of GMV, growing 400% year over year.
- We are accelerating direct hotel sales via tech and negotiation, targeting 60% share by year-end; STRs in São Paulo already hit 5% of bookings (+110% year over year), with 20,000 new STR rooms to be added to the platform by year-end;
- Launched an AI-powered expense review layer (Trust Expense): In the last 3 months, 1.56 million expenses were processed, with 185.9 million Brazilian reais (about $37 million; 26% of volume) flagged for AI review before payment—catching 49 million Brazilian reais (about $9.6 million) in suspected duplicate payments (reduced frauds for our customers)
What is the biggest challenge your company is currently facing?
Scaling a corporate travel and fintech platform across multiple Latin American markets simultaneously, each with its own regulatory, payments and hotel-airline-supply landscape, while keeping a single product and operating model coherent. Every new initiative, from direct hotel sourcing to international expansion, has to prove itself financially before we scale it further. Capital efficiency and unit economics discipline are nonnegotiable: We'd rather grow deliberately with strong margins than chase top-line growth that doesn't pay for itself. Balancing an ambitious growth trajectory with that discipline shapes nearly every strategic decision we make.
Where is AI having the biggest impact on your business?
AI is reshaping the entire company. Today, 40% of customer service is handled 100% by AI, powered by a proprietary multi-agent architecture we continuously evolve. About 60% of the software we ship to production is now AI-built. Beyond metrics, it's a cultural shift: We're hiring less, eliminating some functions entirely and pushing every manager and C-level executive to build software themselves, reducing our dependency on traditional engineering headcount. AI isn't a side project at Onfly; it's becoming the default way we operate, build and serve clients.
PhocusWire Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2027
Stay tuned as we revisit our Hot Travel Startups for 2023 next week and look out for the launch of our Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2027 on Nov. 9.