Startup Stage: Travel Smarter uses agentic AI to optimize airline loyalty for travelers

Travel Smarter

Travel Smarter uses agentic AI to help frequent travelers optimize airline status, points and rewards by aggregating fragmented loyalty data and providing real-time guidance on booking decisions.

The approach aims to increase value for travelers while creating new opportunities for agencies and employers. Travelin.ai is among the first corporate booking platforms to embed Travel Smarter’s loyalty intelligence into the booking flow. 

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Airline loyalty is being rewritten. As programs shift from distance to spend-based models, millions of frequent travelers are losing status and becoming “free agents”—no longer tied to a single airline.

Travel Smarter is a personalized travel loyalty strategist that helps frequent flyers maximize status, mileage earning and rewards through a real-time optimization engine.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business: Travel Smarter’s platform is powered by agentic AI that turns fragmented frequent-flyer data into a single, actionable strategy.

On the consumer side, we ingest a traveler’s flight history, airline program rules, alliance earning tables, credit card ecosystems and fare-class data to calculate, in real time, the fastest path to elite status, upgrades and reward redemptions—based on how they actually fly.

The platform scores every user’s loyalty portfolio across earn efficiency, program choice quality and portfolio hygiene through our proprietary Smarter Score, giving travelers a single metric to understand how well they’re optimizing their travel. Most people leave thousands of points on the table each year because the rules are buried across dozens of airline programs. We surface that in seconds.

Technology: From a technology perspective, the platform runs on a modern serverless stack: Next.js and TypeScript on the frontend, Supabase (Postgres) as the data layer with row-level security and Stripe for subscription management.

We follow a domain-driven architecture with clear separation between business logic, infrastructure and presentation, allowing us to iterate quickly without accumulating technical debt.

The intelligence layer is built on a multi-agent system, with dedicated AI agents for earning optimization, redemption valuation, status path planning and portfolio analysis. These agents collaborate through a unified calculation engine to deliver a continuously improving personalized strategy—not one-off recommendations.

Critically, the system is grounded in structured airline program data—including versioned snapshots of earning rules, tier thresholds and fare-class multipliers—ensuring outputs are based on verified data rather than probabilistic assumptions or AI.  

The result is a platform that feels instant to the user, while running complex optimization underneath.

Give us your SWOT analysis of the company.

Strengths: We combine deep domain expertise with early distribution. On one side, 20+ years across airline distribution, loyalty and travel tech—both B2C and B2B. On the other, strong early traction from a highly engaged frequent flyer audience. The key advantage is our data layer—behavioral and loyalty data that compounds over time and becomes harder to replicate.

Weaknesses: This is a complex problem to solve well. Airline loyalty is fragmented across dozens of programs, each with constantly changing rules. Maintaining accurate, real-time optimization requires significant data normalization and ongoing investment. As an early-stage product, we’re also refining the UX to make that complexity feel simple and intuitive for users.

Opportunities: We’re at the center of a structural shift. Airlines are changing how loyalty works—moving to revenue-based models and raising thresholds—which is creating millions of “free agent” travelers. At the same time, the growth of co-branded credit cards is turning loyalty into a financial ecosystem. We can help create a win-win for the consumer. 

Threats: The biggest risk is execution and speed. This is a category that can be replicated at the surface level but is difficult to do well at scale. Large travel platforms or financial institutions could move into this space, leveraging their distribution and capital. We are watching the rear view. Our defense is speed, data depth and building a product that becomes embedded in how people make travel decisions.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate?

Frequent travelers are still managing loyalty in spreadsheets. I’ve met users planning their entire year in Excel—calculating status points flight by flight, net of taxes, just to understand if they’ll qualify and what ‘partner airline earning’ will achieve for their flights. 

At the same time, over 30% of frequent travelers are not optimizing their earning or status potential, often leaving significant value on the table without realizing it.

Recent changes to airline programs are also creating millions of “free agents”—travelers reassessing where they place their loyalty each year.

The problem is simple: Travelers simply don’t know where the highest-value return is. They don’t know what they’ll earn before they book, whether their status is achievable or if another program would deliver better value—even within the same alliance.

Our agents take the traveler’s current situation and advise on the best next moves for point optimization, status, redemption or credit card strategy: basic questions that the consumer has to go online to find.

For the industry, the challenge is equally significant.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

We’re starting with highly engaged frequent travelers—status holders, road warriors and loyalty optimizers—through direct channels, waitlists and community-led growth. We’ve already seen strong traction through social and frequent-flyer communities, where the problem is most acute. Alongside this, we are activating micro-influencers and affiliate partnerships across travel media and blogs.

On the B2B side, we are partnering with corporate booking platforms and travel management companies to embed our intelligence layer closer to the point of booking. We’ve already secured our first letter of intent, with more in progress.

There is also growing interest from corporate travel buyers, who are increasingly dealing with traveler frustration as status thresholds rise.

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

We started by analyzing the total addressable market across global airline loyalty programs.

• There are approximately 600 million program memberships globally. Adjusting for overlap, this equates to around 200 million unique frequent travelers.
• Of those, roughly 10-14% hold status, representing a serviceable market of approximately 25-30 million status-driven travelers.
• We validated demand through direct engagement with frequent flyer communities, including surveys and interviews with thousands of travelers.
• In one survey of 2,000 respondents, 62% expected to lose their airline status following recent program changes.
• At the same time, airline loyalty programs generate over $90 billion annually, much of it driven by bank partnerships and co-branded credit cards.

Travel Smarter sits directly at the intersection of that consumer behavior and the financial ecosystem.

 How and when will you make money?

We have our first subscribers after our launch. So by definition we are revenue generating in the first month, which is amazing news. 

We operate a hybrid model: B2C and B2B.

On the consumer side, we offer subscription tiers for advanced optimization and strategy, heavily discounted while we move from version one to version two. We will sell discounted lounge passes to those who are striving to achieve status and book concierge services with VIP hotel benefits for leisure customers. We are setting up a service to optimize point redemption while we build out that part to be fully automated in the platform. 

On the B2B side, we plan to monetize through partnerships with travel platforms—including data insights, distribution and affiliate-driven revenue linked to cards and travel products.

Revenue has already started from day one. 

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

The founding team brings over two decades of experience across travel technology, airline distribution and product development.

The CEO is a veteran of Expedia, Egencia, Perk and Sabre and has helped launched a number of booking tools and agencies globally. He has also worked closely with global airlines, travel management companies and booking platforms, giving us a practical understanding of how the ecosystem operates. The CTO previously worked with Walmart and other B2C platforms, and the COO has scaled B2C companies from grassroots to 1M revenue. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We’ve built a geographically distributed team across multiple markets, bringing a range of perspectives and experiences. The company’s ex-Hopper team is based in Serbia; the dev team is Ukrainian; QA and designers are European. We have a 50-50 weighting gender balance today. That said, our C-suite is not balanced, and as we scale up we will be looking to continue that diversity and balance. 

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

Balancing speed and complexity. We’re building in a space where the underlying systems—airline loyalty programs—are fragmented, constantly changing and often unclear.

Turning that into something simple and actionable for users while moving quickly as a startup has been one of the biggest challenges. Plus, I am a perfectionist, and perfection doesn’t exist in a startup. 

Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

We’re solving a real problem at exactly the moment the market is shifting. Loyalty is becoming more complex, not less—and both travelers and the industry are feeling that.

We’re also building more than a consumer product. The data layer we’re creating—based on forward-looking behavior—has value far beyond that. That combination gives us a differentiated position. 

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

We expect to have scaled our user base directly and indirectly and have taken the playbook from the U.K. and Europe to North America, the Middle East and APAC. 

We will have our first corporate booking tools integration live and have established partnerships with various global travel buyers, serving as a benefit for their workforce. Additionally, we will have expanded airline and credit-card coverage and secured multiple B2B partnerships. 

Our focus will be on deepening the data layer and embedding Travel Smarter further into booking systems. 

What is your endgame?

To become the intelligence layer for travel loyalty. Or simply put—the Bloomberg for travel. That could lead to multiple outcomes—including strategic acquisition—but the focus is on building a scalable, standalone business with strong network effects and long-term data value.