Should we worry about fake boarding passes? 😨

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I’d like to appreciate the positive response to our first premium report – thank you! It’s been amazing to see how interested you are on startups in the travel industry. Now we are now planning new way to keep you up-to-date with the most innovative players and ideas in the travel industry – stay tuned 🙂

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here is more info about our Premium Report: Top 100 Travel Startups.

Let’s get back to our weekly curation of the top news on travel innovation, trends and startups:

• Things might have been challenging for the team at Kiwi.com this past week: First, Ryanair accused them of issuing fake boarding passes. Now, KLM sent a letter asking them to stop selling their tickets.

• Sojern and WBR Insights published a new report entitled “How Travel Marketers Are Activating Digital Advertising in 2021”.  This called my attention while reading it: 88% of the travel companies that took part on this research either increased or maintain their budget for digital marketing strategy since COVID-19 started. 

• The Swiss-German startup RoomPriceGenie helps clients to increase revenues by automating pricing decisions. In the past 12 months, they tripled their revenues and now they raised €1.8 million to keep growing.

• There has been some serious discussion about companies requiring employees to get vaccinated. Now Delta Air Lines will charge unvaccinated employees with $200 every month. 

• Some situations can make us feel a bit stuck wondering how can we actively do something to help – for me, the recent situation in Afghanistan was one of these. So it was great to see Airbnb’s social initiative of offering temporarily housing to 20,000 Afghan refugees.

• The number of travel and mobility startups has grown 5% so far in 2021 compared with 2020 – this data is from a recent report published by TNMT this month. 

• Here is another insight we are (already) excited about: travel startup investment is expected to be $44B in 2021. This is really great news.

• While we are on the topic of travel startups: if, like me, you also realised that there are many travel companies are going public recently, I recommend taking a look at this piece about Why 2021 Is the Year of the Travel IPO.