World Travel Market

Held every November at ExCeL, London, the World Travel Market is one of the premier events in the travel industry. It is a global occasion bringing together the best of everything travel has to offer, as well as nearly 50,000 industry professionals.

This year, HouseTrip was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Get Funded Show, a sub-event popular with entrepreneurs, potential entrepreneurs, industry experts, investors and venture capitalists.

Get Funded Show

The competition was tough. HouseTrip was competing against 17 other leading travel startups, as well as being judged by industry heavyweights including:
• Alex Hoye, CEO Latitude Group
• Debu Purkayastha, Principal – Corporate Development / M&A at Google
• Hugo Burge, Executive Chairman, Cheapflights and Founder, Howzat Media
• Dinesh Dhamija, Founder, eBookers
• Peter Waller, Group M&A Director, Thomas Cook
• Glenn Fogel, EVP Corporate Development, Priceline
• Mike Chalfen, General Partner, Advent Ventures

The full (and impressive) list can be read here.

HouseTrip’s first day of competition was on Thursday 11 November. We pitched in the difficult afternoon section, when many of the judging panel seemed to be suffering from the soporific effects of a large lunch! Fortunately, Arnaud’s brilliant presentation woke everyone from their slumber, generating many enthusiastic live Tweets!

After everyone had pitched, there was a nerveracking pause while the final jury (including chairman David Scowsill) decided on the four finalists who would be invited to pitch again the next day. To our delight, HouseTrip was called out first, to compete against Dajiudian (a hotel booking platform for China), Get Your Guide (a platform to find and book tours and activities) and EVAture (Expert Virtual Agent, which uses natural language processing to save human agents time).

David Scowsill

We came back to pitch again on Friday morning. David Scowsill explained that the winner would be chosen based on six criteria, from the idea to the investment potential. HouseTrip pitched first, with Thursday’s presentation slightly extended to elaborate the benefits for guests. Again, after the pitches there was a nerveracking delay. But to our delight, the judges announced HouseTrip as the winner! Jason Katz, the Founding Partner of KP Capital, described HouseTrip as the startup with the highest risk/reward ratio for potential investors.

We are obviously thrilled to have won the event and to see such recognition from our travel industry peers. The event in itself was extremely useful to us in terms of networking and also to be able to get feedback on the venture from successful travel entrepreneurs and investors. We look forward to gathering more owners and guests and continual improvement of the site over the coming months!