Press Releases and Media
Press Releases
and Media

Travelport Accelerator Winners: Taguchi and Data Appeal Selected to Work with Travelport and AWS to Hyper-Personalize Travel Marketing

Melbourne - 10 December 2021

Langley, UK, December 9, 2021: Travelport, a global technology company that powers bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide, today announced that TaguchiMarketing (Taguchi), an Australian tech company, and The Data Appeal Company (Data Appeal), an Italian “scale-up”, have won the first travel retailing challenge from Travelport Accelerator, a new global accelerator program launched in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Travelport Accelerator was created to foster collaboration with innovative thinkers who bring revolutionary ideas to the table,” said Tom Kershaw, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Travelport. “Together with a panel of leading industry experts, we heard some truly unique concepts and viable product ideas. In the end, the solutions presented by Taguchi and Data Appeal were the most compelling as they have the potential to quickly deliver a significant improvement to the personalization of travel marketing by utilizing Travelport+.”

One hundred and twenty (120) tech startups and innovative companies responded to the Travelport Accelerator this year, bringing a variety of digital marketing capabilities to the table such as creating dynamic, personalized video content, ensuring price consistency across multiple retailing channels and visualizing data and sentiment based on social and review posts.

Six companies were then selected to pitch their solutions to experts and decision-makers from some of the world’s most renowned travel companies during an exclusive Industry Pitch Day event held in New York City. The six finalists selected to pitch their solutions were:

The panel of industry judges that participated in the first Travelport Accelerator Industry Pitch Day represented American Express Global Business Travel, Priceline, Southwest Airlines, Internova Travel Group, Direct Travel and Christopherson Business Travel.

THE WINNERS

This year’s challenge was to introduce digital marketing technology for travel companies, delivering highly targeted and personalized offers to customers using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The winning companies were chosen after multiple judging rounds, where entrants pitched their solutions to a panel of industry experts on how each would revolutionize customer acquisition and retention for travel brands.

Taguchi supports marketing automation programs with its platform designed to optimize dynamic marketing content to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time. The company received the highest collective score from the judging panel of all Travelport Accelerator finalists for its concept that combines the Taguchi automation platform with Travelport data and AWS Cloud scalability. Together, it has the ability to bring marketing automation to the masses within the travel sector. Taguchi gains simplified access to the Travelport+ platform and AWS Cloud tools to bring its concept to life with a viable proof of concept.

Data Appeal analyses the sentiment across all points of interest in a destination, in real-time, from over 100 sources and 500 million social posts and reviews each day. With Data Appeal Studio, their territory analysis platform, users can visualize all of the data and compare and contrast time periods, source markets, competitors and more. The company’s winning concept for this first Accelerator challenge will help travel brands, tourism boards, and destinations effectively enhance their marketing operations with the ability to transform data into real-time actionable insights. Data Appeal will utilize Travelport+, Travelport’s next-generation travel marketplace, and technology from AWS to progress the development of its digital marketing solution for travel.

Among the exceptional finalists, a noteworthy submission that garnered attention from judges was Adobe. Adobe pitched its unique Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform under the premise that by working together with Travelport and AWS, the companies have the opportunity to solve complex digital marketing challenges in travel by building the world’s largest unified travel ID. Both Travelport and AWS plan to continue discussions with Adobe about this solution.

“The Travelport Accelerator was designed to tackle real industry challenges, and I am very impressed with the innovative ideas that Taguchi and Data Appeal, and so many others, presented to solve the industry’s challenges in digital marketing,” said David Peller, Managing Director at AWS Travel and Hospitality. “I’m confident that, together, AWS and Travelport will impact the future of the industry and transform the way businesses in travel connect with their travel customers.”

For more information, please visit https://www.travelport.com/accelerator#winners.

About Travelport

Travelport is a global technology company that powers bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide.
Buyers and sellers of travel are connected by the company’s next generation marketplace, Travelport+, which simplifies how brands connect, upgrades how travel is sold, and enables modern digital retailing.
Headquartered in London, United Kingdom and operating in more than 180 countries around the world, Travelport is focused on driving innovation that simplifies the complex travel ecosystem.

Travelport Media Contacts

Katie Cline (United Kingdom)
Head of External Communications
m:+44 7387 056213
katie.cline@travelport.com

Jennifer Blackburn (United States)
Senior Communications Manager, Technology & Americas
m:+1 (404) 406 9429
jennifer.blackburn@travelport.com

Danny Saad (United Kingdom)
Communications Executive
m:+44 7778 967591
danny.saad@travelport.com