As a group, catboats haven’t yet become big hits. They are automated bots that let you interact with brands and services through messaging apps. Despite that, investors have poured $8 million into a hotel booking startup called Snap Travel, which lets user’s book rooms via text messages and Facebook Messenger.
IMovie Capital led the $8 million Series A round, backing Luxury Retreats, which just sold for $200 million to Airing. Also participating in the round were seed round investors Light bank Bee Partners and Hedge Wood as well as strategic investor and Expedia board member Peter Kern.
In conjunction with Snap Travel’s fundraising, I Movie’s Chris Renault has joined the board.
As a result of his prior company, Ad Parlor, which grew to $100 million in revenue before being sold to Acknowledge in 2011, Hussein Fatal and Henry Si, who previously built unmentioned and worked at Google, where he helped launch YouTube Music Insights, founded the startup in spring 2016.
Snap Travel
“Customers want the experience of a travel agent without calling or walking into a store,” Shi explains. As a result, they realized chatting could be used to deliver the hotel booking experience. Snap Travel operates like a modern-day travel agency thanks to its human agents. As needed, they will contact hotels for you, including confirming your check-in and negotiating a free upgrade on your behalf.
When customers use Snap Travel for their bookings, it learns more about their individual preferences – for instance, whether they need free WI-Fi or free breakfast – and then considers those for future recommendations.
Sometimes Snap Travel offers deal you can’t find anywhere else, but that’s not always the case. It has access to the same unsold hotel inventory as others, as explained on its website. Hotels on the service are sourced both directly from hotels and through partners such as Expedia, Booking.com, Amadeus, Hotels.com, and Sabre (pending).
In contrast, since Snap Travel displays prices through private, 1-on-1 chats – not publicly on the web – agreements between hotels and some hotel booking services prevent them from publishing their super-low rates publicly.
Lower Cost is not Snap Travel’s
We are 100 percent free to our customers…the way we make money is through hotel commissions,” he says. “By chatting with the customer over a channel that’s very intimate, like SMS or Messenger, we’re building a relationship with them. Creating a positive experience is a conversation – and that conversation doesn’t end after you place your order. It includes everything from the search process to the purchase process to the upgrade process and even after the purchase has been made,” Shi explains.
When a user fails to complete a transaction, Snap Travel can retarget them directly in their messaging inbox using things like Sponsored Messages. Using Messenger retargeting in this way, Snap Travel reports a 30 percent increase in conversions.
Earn with Snap Travel’s
Travel brands offering mobile experiences present lucrative earnings opportunities for affiliate marketers and travel bloggers as more customers book their travel on smartphones and other mobile devices. A successful example of such a platform is Snap travel. Travel brands can deliver personalized offers directly to their customers through Snap travel, which only requires them to send a message. Here’s how to earn with Snap Travel’s affiliate program, now available through Travel Payouts, and what it has to offer for clients.
Snap travel is a revolutionary product from Snap commerce that offers the most convenient travel deals via SMS, What Sapp, and Messenger. Using an advanced machine-learning algorithm, the service collects thousands of hotel offers from its partners. Offers are filtered according to price, destination, quality, and value.