🚫 OTAs Suck ✅ Building a Book Direct, Decentralized, Open-OTA ➜ 🚀 Operators Get Direct Bookings ✈️ Travelers Get Rewards for Booking Direct 💰 Anyone Who Refers Travelers Owns Them & the Revenue Stream They Generate.

🐥 I'm a startup founder, launching a direct booking travel platform for the AI agent era.

Why? Today, Online Travel Agent (OTA) commissions are draining 10's of billions of dollars out of the travel ecosystem. They enrich "Big Tech" and "Big Travel", at the expense of everyone else. I know because I helped them do it. For years I was a super-affiliate of Expedia and other big OTAs. I fed $100m+ in hotel bookings to the OTAs, generating $10m in commissions, but adding little of value to the ecosystem.

Now, I'm building a new travel distribution platform and protocol that enables travelers and their AI agents bypass the OTA middlemen and book direct.

👇 Want to be notified when we launch? Leave a comment in the featured post below titled "AI-powered community", or reach out and connect! 

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Previously...

🐣 I co-founded a venture studio. We launched 3 notable ventures:
 
1️⃣ 3Genius International. Network of travel booking websites. $100M+ in bookings and $10M+ in gross profit.

2️⃣ Moola.com. Multiplayer game. Grew virally to 450k community members, $7.6M economy. PCWorld's “Best Places to Waste Time on the Web”.
 
3️⃣ Locationary. Local data and community platform. Rewarded users for crowdsourcing local business data (eg. like for Apple Maps). $4.5M in funding. Acquired by Apple.

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🧠 Current Interests: AI, community, machine learning, travel, fintech, loyalty rewards, web3 / tokens / blockchain, creator & influencer economy, social commerce, marketplaces, network effects.

Arlen Ritchie

Boxcribe

Responsible for the successful market launch, growth and adoption of the Boxcribe platform that fundamentally simplifies software development for travel content integration so that businesses can integrate lots of different content sources (air, car, hotel, cruise, vacations, dining, events, etc.) without requiring a large development team.

Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer

@aquila

As part of commercial aviation consulting team, consulted large global airlines on travel technology, payments, and other financial technologies, loyalty, distribution strategies including online and offline travel agencies, hotels and cruises.

Principal, Travel Technology

Affinity Capital Exchange Inc.

Help ACE revolutionize the loyalty economy by creating a specialist trading venue that facilitates issuance and trading of points between loyalty industry participants, operating partners and investors via point backed financial securities. As with any early stage company, current roles and responsibilities include a wide range of functions ranging from technology to commercial. Technology responsibilities include product delivery, project management, testing, demo, driving requirements related to Nasdaq's X-stream trading platform launch and engage in other launch readiness activities. Commercial responsibilities include ongoing initiatives on client research, preparatory work on various client and commercial engagement models, investor presentations, conferences, etc.

Technology, Business Operations & Market Development

Include4 Technologies

Facilitate the growth of Include4 Technologies. Nurture relationship with strategic accounts. Develop pipeline of new business. Thorough knowledge of software services marketplace and key competitors. Write proposals, contracts and prepare sales presentations. Implement strategic marketing plan.

Marketing and Business Development

Travelocity

I work for Travelocity Partner Network where we power hundreds of white label travel sites using Travelocity's booking engine. The travel sites range from large airlines, banks providing loyalty based travel programs, major online portals, convention and visitor bureaus, major travel clubs and large meta search engines. I manage a team of account managers. My team's primary responsibilities include working closely with the partners and help them market our products to their customers. We consult our partners on customer acquisition techniques (SEO, SEM, Social Media, Youtube, viral marketing, etc), best practices on user experience, use of analytic in understanding customer behavior on shopping paths and advice them on different Travelocity products and services that can help them grow their business. I have personally managed relationship with the major US full service carriers, large travel agencies and major hotel chains.

Manager, Account Management Team

Sabre Travel Network

Marketing manager for a web based booking engine that allowed travel agencies to offer online travel products and services to their consumers.  With more than 1,300 customers, the product generated over $150 MM in gross sales and half a million in annual bookings. 
	
Responsibilities include developing marketing plans, product positioning, competitive analyses, product road map, pricing strategies and continually identifying changing customer needs and delivering enhanced solutions.

Marketing Manager, Online Travel Portal

Managed a $40 million merchandising product launch from strategic planning to tactical activities 
- Carried out landscape and segmentation analysis
- Conducted market research supported by focus groups and on-site customer visits
- Developed product vision, product scope and requirements, detailed business & marketing plan 
  (including financials) and product road map
- Drove the solution set across development, merchandising, marketing communications, sales and 
  content delivery teams 
- Managed internal and external communications and positioning strategies for the product including 
  collateral, press releases, data sheets and end-user support documentation

Product Manager, Point of Sale (POS)

- Modeled several financial deal structures in Sabre and Travelocity’s M&A initiatives
- Gained experience in contract negotiations and commercial agreements
- Developed new product pricing strategies 
- Evaluated new business opportunities using NPV & ROI models
- Industry analysis, reporting and management support
- Tracked investments and costs and managed funding process, capital plan, budget, infrastructure 
  costs and transfer pricing

Senior Financial Analyst, Corporate Finance

- Helped develop global hospitality strategy as part of a strategy team to identify opportunities to 
  expand Sabre’s hospitality business
- Build business case identifying $75-$100 million revenue opportunity for Sabre to participate in the 
  wholesale and distressed lodging inventory market 
- Presented Sabre’s market entry strategies in the e-procurement marketplace for the hospitality 
  industry. Ariba was selected to provide the technology and software platform.   
- Championed the launch of an online data-mining tool to support hotel customers for their business 
  intelligence needs. The product was a giant step towards strengthening customer relationship 
  management and won great customer appreciation.

Business Development Principal, Hotel Marketing & Supplier Relations

American Airlines

- Managed implementation and delivery of large network infrastructure projects for AA
- End-to-end network evaluation, connectivity, optimization and custom solutions

Network Engineer

A seasoned professional with vast experiences in product marketing, and providing leadership to facilitate client management and account retention. Provide consultation to airlines, travel service providers, online e-commerce companies and start-ups on developing business strategies , building digital marketing, merchandising and customer acquisition strategies.

taplio

The Battle

Arlen Ritchie

Dipanjan De

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