Travelstop named one of the top startups in 2019 by Skift

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Travelstop was named one of the top travel startups to watch out for in 2019 by none other than Skift.

The largest industry intelligence platform on travel, Skift gathers and reports the latest news and insights on the global travel industry. And every year, drawing from hundreds of reviews on emerging travel companies, they come up with a list of the most promising venture-backed travel companies.

Some notable companies that have earned a place on previous lists include Singapore’s RedDoorz and Czech Republic’s Kiwi. It’s a huge honour for us to be recognised alongside these other big names in the industry—and we have you to thank for it.

Thank you to all our loyal customers for trusting in our platform. Huge thanks to our partners as well—we couldn’t have done it without you. And of course, a big thank you to our investors for your continuous support.

Humble beginnings

We started Travelstop back in August 2018 because we were all too familiar with the struggle of planning business travels and reporting expenses.

While the thought of exploring a foreign country and meeting new potential partners is always exciting, the whole experience is bogged down by tons of paperwork and rigid travel policies. Not to mention a lot of time is spent just researching on flights and accommodations.

So we came up with Travelstop—a one-stop platform that can take care of all your business travel needs, from planning business trips up to claiming reimbursements.

But while it was exciting embarking on this huge, new endeavour, the journey hasn’t always been easy. Asia is a huge, complex, and largely untapped market. With lots of different cultures, languages, and consumer behaviours, the challenge was really to introduce the concept of business travel management, which was still a relatively unknown solution in this market.

However, the pain of manually having to manage business travel matters is very real and certainly big enough to warrant the search for a solution. SMEs are already hard-up on time and resources, so it makes no sense wasting energy on these small tasks. But the existing solutions available in the market are either too expensive or ineffective.

So when we introduced our easy-to-use business travel solution into the market at an affordable price point, we were happy that they were all ears.

Since then, we’ve hit some memorable milestones along the way.

The highest of highs

Last year, we raised $1.2 million from investors in a funding round led by SeedPlus and travel industry veterans from Expedia and Yahoo!

Since then, we’ve rolled out fully localised versions of the Travelstop platform in seven languages across different Asian markets, namely Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. And we even launched our iPhone app!

We also made some big upgrades to our platform based on the feedback we were getting from our customers.

We added new travel manager features such as Book For Others because we realised that a lot of CEOs and CFOs don’t always have the time to book their travels themselves. We introduced Travel Policy to automatically flag bookings that violate the policy. And Group Bookings to easily book the same flight for multiple travellers at once.

Lastly, we pride ourselves for having one of the largest inventory of flights in Asia, with over 800 airlines and interlining options available on our platform, and over 300,000 hotels (with even more coming soon).

We’re thankful that we were able to hit all of these milestones in less than a year. Hard work pays off, and it pays off in spades!

The best is yet to come

It’s really been one roller coaster of a ride, but the adventure doesn’t stop here. Our goal is to modernise and simplify the business travel experience for growing businesses everywhere so that travelling for business can just be about business.

Soon, users can look forward to a more extensive line up of hotels on our platform, a new Android app, and even more upgraded features for travel managers.

We’re on a mission to shape the future of business travel, and we’re thankful to Skift for recognising that and motivating us. At the same time, Travelstop is just one of many amazing companies that are changing the face of modern travel. Congratulations to holidayme.com, ixigo.com, and vntrip.vn as well for making the cut!

Read Skift’s article to see the other great startups that made it to this list.