Hotel Booking Chatbot SnapTravel Launched at #MobileBeat2016 and Announced $1.1M Funding

Today at #MobileBeat 2016, SnapTravel announced the launch of its new chatbot hotel booking service. The company also announced the closing of its $1.1M seed round, led by Lightbank and Bee Partners. SnapTravel claims to be the fastest and easiest way to find and book the perfect hotel room.

To use SnapTravel, users provide a destination city, travel dates, budget and any preferences via SMS, Facebook Messenger or Slack, and SnapTravel returns with a recommendation. SnapTravel says it aims to find the perfect hotel room by understanding each user’s personal preferences and layering them on top of verified hotel reviews, location popularity scores, real-time pricing data and exclusive deals across hundreds of suppliers. According to SnapTravel CTO Henry Shi, the bot then analyzes over a thousand points of information to recommend the perfect hotel room at the best price.

“Finding and booking the right hotel is currently a broken and frustrating experience – having to open numerous sites and apps.” says Hussein Fazal, CEO at SnapTravel. “This process should be as simple as messaging a friend you trust.” When asked how the startup can compete and win against large incumbents in the travel space, Fazal replied “we’re supplier agnostic.”  

SnapTravel is the latest startup that is leveraging the paradigm shift where messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and Slack are opening their platforms to developers to build chatbots. Fazal says the company is targeting the $550B hotel booking market and believes its approach will change the way consumers book travel. SnapTravel uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) technology to interact through conversation with users. If a user makes a statement that is ambiguous to the bot, a human agent will step in to guide the bot. According to the company, this hybrid bot/human approach will allow the service to scale while still offering human, personal service to its customers.

SnapTravel Logo | Credit: SnapTravel

“With this funding, we are excited to scale up our engineering team. Each hotel booking trains the machine learning model as it works towards full automation,” says Henry Shi, CTO at SnapTravel. “The result will be a highly effective and enjoyable user experience, unparalleled in the market.”

Fazal previously co-founded AdParlor, a Facebook advertising tech company, which was acquired by AdKnowledge in 2011. Shi, a former Google employee, worked on YouTube and the uMentioned social networking app and was an early machine learning engineer at LendUp. SnapTravel’s advisors include industry experts from the travel world including Scott Booker, former president of Hotels.com; Stuart Silberg, former CTO of Expedia; Eduardo Schutte, SVP of Hilton Worldwide; and Shariq Minhas, co-founder of Stayful.