In Phocus

Mews CEO Matthijs Welle sits down with PhocusWire's Linda Fox to explain an eventful year for the hospitality tech company. Six months after raising $300 million in Series D funding at a $2.5 billion valuation, Mews cut 15% of its workforce. Welle says the two moves are unrelated. The restructuring aimed to build an AI-first organization where teams act quickly instead of waiting on meetings, and it created a new role: the product builder.

That shift is reshaping Mews' acquisition strategy. Welle splits deals into two types: property management systems, which Mews sunsets over time, and products folded into R&D. With in-house builders now creating products faster and cheaper, buying them makes less sense.

Welle also covers fragmentation in hospitality tech and why hoteliers want a single vendor, how AI turns Mews into one operating system, his working relationship with founder Richard Valtr and plans to win more large hotel brands.

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Hands In co-founder Samuel Flynn joins PhocusWire's Linda Fox in the PhocusWire Studio to explain how split payments differ from buy now, pay later. Flynn says Hands In targets insufficient funds at checkout, letting travelers combine payment methods and groups split costs across participants. He positions the company as a technology layer rather than a lender. He also predicts agentic AI will replace traditional checkout and discusses fragmentation, blockchain and fraud.

 

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After 20 years in institutional trading, Natasha Martsekis left banking to follow her passion for hospitality. In 2014 she founded Bright Blue Villas, a luxury villa rental company built on the principles she learned on the trading floor: trust, accountability and treating owners as strategic partners.

In this conversation recorded in the PhocusWire Studio at Phocuswright Europe 2026, Martsekis explains why that institutional approach paid off and why she wishes she had grown the portfolio faster early on. Bright Blue Villas now manages 325 villas across 20 destinations in Greece, and she sees room to scale as exceptional new properties go up on the smaller islands.

She also shares where AI fits in luxury travel. In her view it supports the human touch rather than replacing it, with the biggest gains in pre-booking, pre-arrival and repeat stays. Martsekis discusses operational challenges, destination evolution and the role of the experience concierge.

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Perk (formerly TravelPerk) has launched an MCP connector linking Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants directly to its travel and spend management platform. Chief product officer Nikita Miller frames it around killing "shadow work," the time employees waste digging through reports and switching tools for basic answers. The connector lets travelers pull trip and expense details, finance teams access invoices, travel managers review approvals and policy rules, and event managers check sessions and attendee data, all through natural language.

Speaking in the PhocusWire Studio, Miller said the goal spans from individual spend all the way to CFO-level reporting at month's end. Perk plans to expand the connector this summer to cover booking, expense submission, receipt uploads and approval flows, a further push into agentic travel management.

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Q2 2026 was quiet for travel startup funding but busy for M&A. Only two Series B rounds stood out: hotel tech company Smartness raised €47 million, and India-based hostel operator The Hosteller raised $16 million. WeRoad closed the quarter's lone Series C, $58 million led by Airbnb. Clarasight raised an $11.5 million Series A for product development and geographic expansion. Phocuswright's Travel Startups Interactive database shows $1.7 billion in funding for the year's first five months, up from $1.1 billion in 2025.

M&A carried the quarter. Expedia Group's acquisition of CarTrawler stood out, aimed at building a one-stop shop for B2B travel. Juniper acquired Deem, and Lighthouse acquired Hotelrank.ai. Bigger deals included Long Lake Management's $6.3 billion purchase of American Express Global Business Travel and Apollo Global Management's agreed $5.7 billion takeover of easyJet.

Speaking in the PhocusWire Studio at Phocuswright Europe 2026, Cambon Partners' Morgann Lesné told Linda Fox that deal volumes from 2022-2023 haven't returned, but consolidation pressure is building as small players run out of runway.

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Revolut's AI travel push, a year after acquiring Swifty, is led by Stanislav Bondarenko, the startup's co-founder, now inside Revolut's lifestyle unit. His goal is unchanged: book flights and hotels from a single voice message.

Speaking with PhocusWire's Linda Fox in the PhocusWire Studio, Bondarenko named the advantages of joining a larger company — stability and access to Revolut's existing user base. But the bigger factor is data: the transaction and behavioral history of Revolut's millions of customers. He called this double-edged. It shortcuts development because the team already knows what works, but more data also means more noise, so the real challenge is separating signal from clutter.

He also described using a traveler's past trips and spending to anticipate needs before they're stated, comparing it to mind reading — removing steps by inferring intent rather than requiring explicit input.

His boldest claim: booking won't need a dedicated chatbot or app going forward. It could happen contextually, wherever the traveler already is.

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Zerolook, a Switzerland-based startup that predicts flight prices, has raised US$1.9 million in pre-seed funding led by Playfair, with participation from Vento Ventures, TrueSight Ventures, Alpha Ventures and several angel investors. Its machine learning model predicts flight prices and itineraries, aiming to cut the volume of searches hitting airline systems.

Recent OAG figures show up to 20,000 searches generate one ticket sale, a number that could climb to 200,000 as agentic artificial intelligence (AI) increases search volume. Zerolook's model presents users with a predicted itinerary, price and confidence score.

In the PhocusWire Studio, CEO Simone Lini discussed plans to compute prices differently than the fare-filing process used for six decades, along with the startup climate and AI's impact on distribution.

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Loveholidays has quietly built one of the fastest-growing positions in European package travel, expanding from a UK-only startup in 2012 into eight markets and roughly 15% of the UK packaged travel market. 

In this conversation, head of strategy Isabella Cheng unpacks the bigger shift behind that growth: dynamic packaging has gone from a niche 2% of the UK market in 2009 to about a quarter of it today, and Loveholidays has built its entire model around being the technology layer that aggregates flights and hotels on the fly rather than selling pre-built package holidays.

Cheng also gets specific about where AI actually earns its place at the company, walking through how their chatbot Sandy handles the majority of customer chats at agent-level satisfaction and saves an estimated £4 million a year, and how AI-assisted coding has let engineering nearly double its deployment pace without adding headcount. She wraps with a candid take on the IPO question that's been trailing the company for years.

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Less than a year into leading OAG, CEO Filip Filipov sat down with PhocusWire's Linda Fox and the thing that's actually surprised him isn't AI, it's customers.

Preferences are outrunning what technology can deliver, on both consumer and B2B sides. The industry, he says, is chasing customers' dreams of what a product could be rather than what's currently buildable.

AI adoption matched his expectations directionally but beat them on speed — marketing, finance, and commercial teams picked it up as fast as engineering did.

But he pushes back on treating adoption as even across the industry. A startup with the right people moves fast. A decades-old institution carrying legacy process and PII constraints is often capped at Copilot in Word. He's also skeptical of "AI" as a catch-all, lumping product, technology, and distribution together as if they're one thing.

The conversation also covers the CEO role's personal weight and where he sees real innovation in travel.

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Generative AI is transforming how travelers discover and book trips, according to a PhocusWire interview with John Matson, chief revenue officer of Propellic, and Carlo del Mistro, founder of Stiplo.

Del Mistro said hotel owners often contact his company after finding their property missing from ChatGPT results. He likened today's AI visibility landscape to early SEO, when ranking drivers were poorly understood and constantly shifting. Matson said tracking is still early stage, though statistically relevant measurement is now possible to show movement on specific prompts.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is growing in importance alongside traditional SEO, which both speakers said still plays a major role, depending on the LLM used. AI referral traffic remains small but is growing exponentially, with higher conversion since those visitors arrive already qualified.

On suppliers versus OTAs, Matson said he is bullish on suppliers, who can build products from physical assets and retain first party data.

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