Travelport will use a recently announced partnership with Amazon Web Services as a lever for its latest accelerator program for startups.

The agreement with AWS to handle its cloud hosting was announced in June this year.

Travelport Accelerator is part of a new service called Travelport Focus, designed to concentrate on innovation in the industry and which is also supported by AWS.

It will have a framework of helping startups work through a number of tasks in the retail end of innovation for the travel sector, including data protection and personalization.

The area for the ten startups that are accepted to join the first wave will focus on digital marketing, with a view to “introduce cutting-edge digital marketing technology for travel companies, which uses behavioral and demographic traveler data to deliver highly targeted and personalized, real-time offers to customers.”

Judges from American Express Global Business Travel, Internova Travel Group, Direct Travel and Christopherson Business Travel will select three of the ten startups to move forward with their ideas.

AWS will provide up to $100,000 in hosting credits and Travelport will give startups access to the GDS.

This is Travelport’s second attempt at building an accelerator program for startups. The first was launched in 2015, known as Travelport Labs.

It was based in Denver, U.S., with a mission to mentor each startup through a series of projects, including introducing them to technology services (including Travelport’s own APIs) and partners that would assist in their development.

Some of the startups that went through the project received a seed round of $30,000 but Travelport did not take equity stakes in the businesses.

Labs eventually closed in 2018, after five intakes of new businesses, with the company saying it would focus on “innovation opportunities that have been presented by our relationships with our key strategic technology partners like TCS, Microsoft and IBM.”

Source: PhocusWire

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