Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2025: Obvlo

Obvlo

Headquarters: Scotland

CEO: Callum McPherson

Website: Obvlo

Founding date: 2021

Investment: $2 million

Obvlo is an AI solution for producing and maintaining
personalized local content for any destination on earth. Hotel and travel
brands use content from Obvlo in their digital journey to drive
conversations and enhance guest experience. Unlike manually produced
content, Obvlo provides rich and visual recommendations that are
dynamically kept fresh, up to date and personalized to the end user.

PhocusWire coverage

STARTUP STAGE: Obvlo helps travel brands provide personalized destination content  

Strategic goals for 2025

In 2024, Obvlo reduced the time to build out curated and
personalized content for a new destination (like a medium-sized city) from
two weeks to under one hour. This innovation has allowed our solution to
scale and be useful to hotel chains and other travel verticals operating
across many global destinations. The problem of producing and maintaining
content grows with the number of destinations being served. This
innovation is fueling expansion from the UK hotel market, where we have a
strong presence, into European groups. In 2025 the goal is to expand
further afield targeting the US and Asia.

Lessons learned since founding

We’ve gone through many twists and turns, beginning
life as a B2C proposition during the pandemic. We started using emerging
AI tools to solve our own challenges with scalability and as we did so,
the potential to fix this wider issue for the B2B travel market became
very clear. Producing and maintaining content at scale was an unsolved
industry pain point and the trends towards personalization made this an
ever greater opportunity. Knowing when to press forward and when to pivot
has been crucial and customer obsession has kept us on the right
path. We are fortunate now to have incredible customers like PPHE and
Valor Hospitality who shape our roadmap and ensure our solutions get
better every day.