Sophia Antipolis, France, March 29, 2017 – Latest funding round led by Entrepreneur Venture, and includes Pléiade Venture.

Travelaer, a company that builds products for the travel industry designed to improve the customer experience, announced today it has raised 4.3 million Euros in a round of funding from a collection of investors led by Entrepreneur Venture and including Pléiade Venture, plus existing Travelaer investors Calypso Capital and Alderville.

“The travel industry has been forcing customers to book and manage travel online in the same way for the past 20 years,” said Travelaer co-founder and CEO Mike Slone. “The big travel tech companies, which are focused more on transactions than customer experience, require airlines to adopt technology that leads their customers into unfortunate and unnecessarily bad digital experiences. We are here to change this.”

Attending ITB Berlin? Come hear our CEO’s thoughts on “Chatbots, AI And Machine Learning In Customer Interaction” on Wednesday, March 8th at 3pm in Hall 6.1, on the eTravel Stage. Other panelists include Timothy J O’Neil-Dunne (Co-Founder Expedia and Tnooz), Matthias Keller (Chief Scientist, Kayak) and David Low (Developer Advocate, Skyscanner).

Listen to our Chief Experience Officer, Mike Slone, as well as other European entrepreneurs, chat about start ups in Europe.

Our CEO, and other industry experts were asked for their thoughts on what will be the most important trends in mobile travel for 2017…

Conversational commerce may be in its infancy but now is the time understand how it fits into your digital strategy. With social media came the dismantling of the wall between travel companies and their customers. While it took time for people to completely drop their guard on social media, today customers are more comfortable than ever in this environment, and the rise of people using messaging services bears witness to this. By August 2015 at least 2.5 billion people were using at least messaging app, according to Statista, a number that’s expected to grow to 3.6 billion by 2018. Recognising that they need to be where their customers are, a number of companies have started to strategically align themselves with messaging services, most commonly Facebook Messenger. Some are also experimenting with chat bots.