What a day! The FutureTravel Summit returned to Barcelona on 29 October, bringing together more than 450 people from across the travel industry at Antigua Fábrica Estrella Damm.
On stage, speakers shared where they see travel heading, and AI ran through many of the conversations. The program also went beyond technology, with sessions on creativity, on leadership and decision-making in the uncertain times we are living in, and on how we can measure the impact of travel and make it a positive one. Off stage, the conversations kept going over coffee, and we saw plenty of new connections being made throughout the day.
The afternoon closed with the FutureTravel Pitch Competition, where ten travel tech startups pitched for a prize worth around €150K in credits. With so many strong teams, the jury had a tough decision, and in the end Equera took the win. Equera helps community-run tourism projects, such as village experiences and local guides, get listed and booked online. Congratulations to the Equera team and to every founder who pitched!
The pitch finalists
While Equera may have taken home the win this year, the other nine startups were just as full of ambition, each bringing forward clever, innovative ideas to make travel better, more seamless and more efficient. Here’s a closer look at the teams that pitched alongside them at the sixth edition of the FutureTravel Summit:
- Bundleport: A Barcelona startup, started in 2024, that gives travel companies a simpler way to work with all their suppliers. Agencies and tour operators usually have to check prices and availability across many separate systems. Bundleport brings them into one AI-powered platform, so a team can find options, build offers for customers and handle the bookings in the same place. One connection replaces many, which saves time and leaves more room to sell.
- ChuuChuu: Started in 2024, helps travellers choose train trips they can count on. Instead of only showing the fastest or cheapest route, the Belgium based company uses real time records from rail networks across Europe to point people to journeys that are least likely to run late, get cancelled or make them miss a connection. It helps people planning a train trip know ahead of time whether a route is likely to work out.
- dAIrect: Founded in 2025, dAIrect helps hotels get picked by AI travel assistants. It rewrites a hotel’s website content into a clear, organised form that conversational AI tools can read and recommend, and it keeps improving that content based on how travellers use these tools and what they’re looking for. With hotels easier to find when people plan trips using AI, dAIrect helps them get more direct bookings and depend less on traditional online booking channels.
- hoppswapp: It’s platform that helps people travel without paying for a hotel every night. Members can swap homes with each other, stay with other members, or look after someone’s pet while they’re away. New members get a starting balance of 7 nights, so they can travel before they host anyone themselves. It’s built for travellers who care more about staying in real homes and meeting like-minded people than about the usual nightly rate.
- Joia: Founded in 2023 in Switzerland, Joaia lets destinations build and run their own AI local travel guides, using verified content that the destination itself owns. Tourism organisations can publish these chat-style guides on their websites, apps, WhatsApp and other channels, while staying in control of what is recommended and what visitor information is shown. By combining AI with trusted local knowledge, Joaia helps destinations give visitors a better experience, influence where travellers go, and learn more about what visitors are looking for.
- Opally: Based in Denmark, Opally makes an AI receptionist for hotels that handles guest messages on websites, messaging apps, email and phone calls. It replies instantly using the hotel’s own information, and it can take reservations, offer upgrades and extras, and deal with routine guest requests. With all guest conversations in one AI assistant, hotels can reply faster, take pressure off the front desk and give the same level of service at any hour.
- Sarucci: Founded in 2025 and based in Malta, Sarucci builds an AI platform that helps independent hotels set their room prices and make business decisions. It brings together business data analysis, pricing that adjusts to demand, market insights and AI agents in one tool. It automates the pricing work and explains each recommendation, so hotels of any size can earn more without the complexity of traditional revenue management systems.
- Travecta: Founded in 2026, Travecta builds the technology behind multi-day tours, linking local tour operators with global sellers through one connection. It turns supplier content that arrives in messy formats into organised tours that can be booked, and it handles contracts, availability and sales. Built for the growing AI-driven travel world, it helps tour operators put their tours online and lets sellers get multi-day tours through a single connection.
- Tripio: Based in Germany, Tripio helps tour operators replace static travel documents with live AI trip assistants. It turns existing itineraries, PDFs and other travel documents into branded web apps that automatically update travellers with itinerary changes, flight updates and key trip information. With less scattered communication after booking, travellers get a better experience, and tour operators get fewer support requests and less manual work.
The jury and the prize
This year’s jury included investors and travel tech experts: Stefan Sandoval Yepes (SKY VC), Suzanna Chiu (Amadeus Ventures) and Merce Tell (Encomenda Capital Partners). They had a hard job choosing among ten strong teams.
Equera received a prize package valued at €150k, including:
- $100,000 in Cloudflare credits, including a dedicated account manager and technical sessions with Cloudflare experts to optimize your infrastructure.
- 90% discount on HubSpot‘s AI-powered and connected CRM (valued at $17,000 USD) to scale sales, marketing, and customer operations.
- 6 months free of Notion Business, including Notion AI (valued at up to $12,000) — roadmaps, projects, fundraising, hiring, all in one place with AI-powered insights.
- 25,000 streaming minutes for Live Video Avatars from D-ID (valued at 12,500 €) for real-time, AI-powered video conversations.
- 12 months of ElevenLabs Startup Grants access; 33 million credits (valued at ~$5,500) and full platform access.
- A complimentary booth at the FutureTravel Summit 2027 (valued at €3,500), including 3 event tickets.
About the winner
Founded in 2024 and based in Berlin, Equera is working on a gap in travel that is easy to miss. A lot of local experiences, like village tours and community-run activities, are still sold offline, so travel companies can’t find or book them. Equera’s AI platform takes the material these businesses already have, such as PDFs, voice notes and flyers, and turns it into products that can be booked online. It also gives tour operators, travel agencies and destinations tools to manage these experiences and bring new suppliers on board more easily, so they can offer unique local experiences at a much larger scale.
Community tourism groups can sign up through a WhatsApp chat with an AI assistant, and Equera creates impact reports as bookings come in, so communities can see where the money goes.
Equera’s win also marks a first for the competition. Co-Founder and CEO Danielle Finch is the first female founder to win the FutureTravel Pitch Competition. She started Equera after discovering community-based tourism in Malaysian Borneo and leaving her job at a leading European travel tech company to build it.
The pitch competition once again showed that startups are not just a side note in the travel industry, they are helping set its direction.
Congratulations to Equera, the winner of this year’s pitch competition, and thank you to every startup, speaker and guest who made the sixth FutureTravel Summit a success.
Here’s to building the future of travel, one idea at a time.
Made possible by sponsors
Nuitée builds the technology that lets travel companies offer and sell hotel stays. Its tools handle searching, pricing, booking and payments, and it also helps hotels get their rooms in front of more buyers. Airlines, banks, loyalty apps and travel companies use it to add hotel booking to their own products without building everything themselves. It also cleans up hotel and room information from different sources, so the same hotel appears once and with the right details.
GIATA is a Berlin based travel tech company, founded in 1996, that works with hotel information. A single hotel often appears under different names and codes across booking systems, which leads to duplicates and mistakes. GIATA’s MultiCodes gives each hotel one clear identity, so travel companies can match the same property across all their suppliers. Hotels, hotel chains, online travel agencies and tour operators around the world use it.
Revolut Business offers business accounts for companies of all sizes, from startups to large firms. Companies can hold and send money in many currencies, make international payments, and give their teams cards with spending limits, all from one app or platform. It helps businesses that work across borders manage their money in a simpler way.