STARTUP STAGE: Obvlo helps travel brands provide personalized destination content

Obvlo

Obvlo gives travel brands dynamic content to increase engagement and eliminate the need to manually create guides for their customers.  

Founded in 2021, Obvlo currently works with hotels that are part of the Hilton, Marriott and IHG brands, and the company is planning to expand its work to destinations and airlines.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

On average personalization drives 10-15% revenue lift. That’s why Chris Silcock, Hilton’s vice president of global brands recently told CoStar that the “most exciting” near-term opportunities lie in personalized content. 

Obvlo is an artificial intelligence-based solution that enables travel businesses to personalize their guest experience and drive engagement with dynamic local content, like personalized guides and recommendations. 

Obvlo uses AI to produce, update and personalize content systemically so that it is always fresh, relevant and up to date. Our vision is “local knowledge at a global scale” and accomplishing this means developing the tools to produce and maintain dynamic content for any destination on the planet.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Obvlo is an AI-first company. Our initial product is a white label web app that allows hotels to deliver personalized local recommendations to guests pre-arrival and on-property with no integration. Hotels under the Hilton, Marriott and IHG brands are using Obvlo to boost guest satisfaction and save their front desk time. 

Powering this platform is our dynamic content engine. The core of our business is the systems we have built to create and maintain destination content globally. This involves everything from scoring and ranking images to sentiment analysis to prioritize locally owned businesses.

We have just released our embeddable widget so that this dynamic content can be placed onto websites and apps with just two lines of code, and we also have an API for brands to build on top of.

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

• Strengths
  • Timing is fantastic - we’re an AI-first company and building a modular backend so we can work with whichever models make the most sense for the use case.
  • Personalization is a major trend in the industry, and we are part of that conversation.
  • In a short space of time, we have onboarded hotel customers within the Hilton, Marriott and IHG brands and have airlines and destinations in our pipeline.
• Weaknesses
  • We’re an early-stage company and that means we must prove ourselves and back up our credibility with enterprise opportunities. It’s important to find innovators in these organizations. 
  • The travel vertical is large and while we’ve proven ourselves in the hotel market, we are constantly fighting to stay focused and not stretch ourselves too thin.
• Opportunities
  • AI is a growing space and is predicted to add trillions of dollars to the global economy. We are in the right place at the right time and riding that wave.
  • The travel industry is thriving and young people increasingly value experiences over things. As millennials and Gen Z grow in share of wallet, personalization and self-service digital products will also grow.
• Threats
  • We’re always monitoring industry giants like Google and OpenAI to ensure we are solving difficult problems that they are unlikely to focus on. Every start-up is competing with Google in some aspect and this again is where having focus on our niche and differentiation is important.

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

We are a B2B product and our customers are hotel and travel companies. We solve a two-sided pain for them - producing rich and engaging content at scale and distributing it in a personalized way. Creating local content for one hotel is relatively easy, doing it for 10 becomes hard, and doing it for 100 is virtually impossible. This is true right across the travel vertical, for example, an airline serving 150 destinations has the same pain point which compounds at scale, meaning our value increases with the size of the customer.

Our content receives 4x the engagement of static websites and over the last month, our guest satisfaction score was 96% on average. While many start-ups are focused on how recommendations are delivered (like AI chatbots), we are far more focused on what is delivered.

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

We are taking a bottom-up approach, focusing on individual hotels with whom the general manager is our buyer and our sales cycle is very short. We work with independents but also Virgin Hotels, Kimptons, Crowne Plazas, Marriotts, Hiltons, etc. At the same time, we are progressing conversations with hotel groups and other enterprises that have a content gap.

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

Our first customer was a 100-room city center independent four-star hotel. Since then we have onboarded paying hotel and short-term rental customers across a broad range of categories. We are focused on producing highly engaging personalized content for any destination on the planet and supplying this both directly to the market and to partners providing technology solutions, like guest app providers, website/app builders etc. The need has always been there, AI presents an opportunity to cut costs and increase engagement and conversion.

How and when will you make money?

We have been generating revenue since our first customer was onboarded a year and a half ago. Our revenue model is primarily recurring subscription fees from hotels using our service to provide local recommendations on everything from restaurants and bars to yoga studios, running routes and events. We also generate commission from bookable tours and activities which is shared with our customers.

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

The founding team have a broad background in data and travel. Two of our founding team met whilst working at a fintech business that used bank data for identity verification while other members of our founding team come from companies like Dell and Lighthouse (OTA Insight). Our shared passion is travel, which brings us together to solve complex problems in this space.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We’re still a small team and have not faced many challenges in this area yet. Our board is chaired by a successful female entrepreneur, and we operate as a remote-first team to ensure we have access to a broad and diverse talent pool.

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

Starting a business is incredibly difficult and keeping focus has been one of the biggest challenges considering the size and scope of the problem we are trying to solve. We address this by having a steadfast focus on our ideal customer profile and ensuring we communicate and collaborate constantly as a team. Three of our founding team have previously started and exited profitable businesses and with an experienced board behind us, we have what it takes to build a scalable and sustainable company.

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

We’ve gotten lucky already with our timing, we were working on AI solutions before it took over the headlines. With the wind in our sails, the rest of our success will come from perseverance and a focused understanding of our target market; both the businesses we serve and the end user.

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

We have a great product that customers love, so our near-term focus is on scaling our hotel customer base and moving up-market towards larger deals. 

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

We aren’t thinking about an endgame yet, because we believe the market is going to change drastically in the next five to 10 years. Travel brands are increasingly becoming technology companies which creates many opportunities.

What won’t change however is content being king. Our dynamic content solutions will power the website and app content of hotel and travel brands, making their products personalized, more engaging and stickier. We see numerous avenues to a successful outcome.