In The Big Chair - Gilad Berenstein of Utrip

Gilad Berenstein, CEO

Utrip has accumulated about 100 million traveler preferences since it launched in 2011. It works with brands such as JetBlue, TUI Group and Hilton to help its customers create personalized itineraries.

Gilad Berenstein founded Utrip in 2011 when he was 23 years old. The idea for an artificial intelligence-powered travel personalization platform came to him after he was frustrated with the amount of time it took to plan a trip to Europe after college. 

Utrip began as a B2C platform and in the last few years you’ve pivoted to focus on B2B. Why the switch?

First and foremost, at Utrip we set out to make trip planning easy, enjoyable and personal for customers. That has always been our goal. I often joke that no 23-year-old has ever started a B2B company because no 23-year-old knows what B2B is. In general, the first reason that we switched from B2C is the fact that we learned how difficult it was to attract customers in the B2C space.

Specifically, looking at a company like TripAdvisor. Even if we somehow figure out how to create as much new content every day as TripAdvisor and even if we somehow amassed as much content as they have, their platform will always rank higher than ours because of their longevity and because of how SEO works.

We realized that A) we could never compete on the ad side because we’d never have as much money as the big companies to buy traffic, and we could never compete on SEO. And B) we also realized that it would be much easier to get to market and achieve our goal through a B2B offering.

We partnered with travel companies to leverage what they already had, this being inventory and users, and brought to the table what they didn’t have, which is really great tech and traveler experiences.

Along with the technical aspects of developing an AI platform, you also worked with psychologists at your alma mater, the University of Washington, to understand decision-making as it relates to travel. What did you learn?

In short, we learned a couple different things. First, the factors that make a good and bad traveler experience. To sum it up, we found that authenticity was the single most important factor in helping people plan a really great travel experience.

This is the idea that the traveler got to do something that is not only unique and authentic to that destination but is not always available. For example, people love going to the Louvre in Paris, and they typically have great experiences there, but very rarely is someone going to tell you a story of the Louvre. They’re much more likely to tell you about the picnic, that concert, that event, the street market they found that felt really unique and local to that destination.

The second thing we learned was that the leading cause to bad travel experiences was the feeling of waste. Wasted experiences, waste of money, waste of time … and that was really about people’s ability to maximize their own experience. One thing that is a waste of time to one, might be amazing to another. It is all about finding the right experience for each person. We call that personalization.

The last thing we learned was all about the way the decision-making process actually works. It begins with framing decisions - where am I traveling, when am I traveling, with whom am I traveling - then you get to meta-level decisions, these being how spontaneous you want to be, what type of pace you’d like to travel at and your budget. Then, you get into interest area specific decisions – do I want to see art, history, etc. 

These were the three core things we learned and, of course, all of that is nonlinear: We plan, dream and execute continuously throughout the travel planning lifecycle. Thus, travel companies must offer a discovery experience across the entirety of that lifecycle.

Brands such as JetBlue, Holland America, Hilton and TUI Group use Utrip, along with many DMOs and attractions. What’s the common denominator there that makes the platform viable for a diverse set of partners?

It’s personalization. It’s the fact that at the end of the day, all of these customers and all of these companies are looking for the same thing: a unique, special and personal travel experience, and they want to be able to do that easily and quickly.

That’s the main thing they have in common. Unlike so many other companies in the space, Utrip hasn’t focused on the best way to sell flights or hotels or on creating the most content ever. Rather, we have focused on personalization.

Because of that, our platform is content and inventory agnostic, which is very important to our customers and allows us to recommend any piece of inventory to any traveler in a personalized way, and it’s omnipresent throughout our partners’ digital experiences. The common denominator is end customers looking for the same things – a unique, special, personal experience.

What are the biggest hurdles to brand adoption of AI systems?

There’s a lot. First, brands have to remember you can’t do it all yourself. Even as an AI company such as Utrip, we certainly can’t do everything ourselves. Brands are going to have to get into the mind frame of partnerships.

Second, is that their existing data already lives in disparate systems, meaning it’s often difficult to use that data in AI right off the bat, and sometimes it takes data-based architecture to get those off the ground. Another hurdle is how to make use of your data.

The last one, and most important, is making sure you “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” There’s so much AI can do to help different companies in different parts of their businesses, but often we are looking for that killer app that does it all.

My recommendation: Find small ways that AI helps your various systems - become comfortable with it, learn about it and from there you’ll figure out how to expand it further. So, don’t let the perfect outcome be the enemy to getting started.

Why do you think some of the mega brands in travel such as Expedia and Booking.com have not adopted similar types of customer interfaces?

For them, it’s all about conversion. Historically, they’ve just been focused on conversion in that single transaction. More recently, however, there’s been a change. We believe we’ve seen this through Scratchpad at Expedia. We’ve also seen it through booking activities on Booking.com - they’re beginning to think a lot more about the complete experience, not just conversion rates for one piece of inventory, but how to do get a bigger package of goods sold to that customer to increase lifetime value and the average transaction size. 

...we found that authenticity was the single most important factor in helping people plan a really great travel experience.

Gilad Berenstein - Utrip

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We are beginning to see those kinds of things from some of the mega brands, but it’s totally understandable that they would never want to do anything that gets in the way of a conversion, and that’s why we haven’t seen things like that in the past. I believe we will see many more in the future though.

What is the future potential for AI for travel brands?

This is a huge area for opportunity and development in the near future. Ultimately, I think it’s all up and down the travel stack (also called the consumer lifecycle).

The most important part is how data will be able to be used globally. First, data will begin in the dreaming and discovery phases. It will help provide easy ways for companies to make recommendations to their customers and keep them engaged.

Then, AI will be involved in selling and making sure you show the right inventory to the right users at the right time. It will also help take care of all the pesky logistical details like geography and hours.

Once this has occurred, AI is really going to make a strong push in marketing, making sure that there are personalized interactions happening to increase engagement and conversion, as well as improve customer service. There’s a huge opportunity for AI in travel, and ultimately, as Matthew Upchurch, CEO of Virtuoso, always says, “What we want to do is to automate the ordinary to accentuate the extraordinary.”

Why do think that so many trip-planning startups have come and gone without gaining much traction?

Almost all of the companies that have come before us have really focused on sales and marketing, and not on a great product – they have kind of put the cart before the horse. We focus on a great consumer experience and good recommendations. It doesn’t matter how many clients you have or how pretty your UI is if you don’t have great recommendations.

Building AI and building recommendation engines is difficult and takes a lot of time. Utrip is more than four years into this, and we’re still working to improve our core capabilities. That is why we’re around - because of that focus on really great travel recommendations.

What’s next for Utrip?

Growth. We just passed 100 million traveler preference data points, which makes our recommendation engines very strong. We’re now very excited about bringing on a bunch of new partners and on explaining the number of use cases that Utrip offers beyond just our white label.

Our partners are using the platform to personalize their marketing initiatives, to enrich their own data and to better understand their own inventories. We’re the clear leader in the travel personalization space and are very excited about growing with many more partners.

You began developing Utrip after personally dealing with planning challenges as you traveled around Europe in 2010, shortly after you graduated college - so you were very young. What advice would an older, wiser Gilad give his younger self?

There’s a lot of advice I would give myself. If you think about the beginning, when we started Utrip, I believed the mantra of “if you build it and it’s pretty good, they will come.” Needless to say, I no longer believe that to be true. I believe that every business, including Utrip, needs to think about revenue from the very beginning, and it doesn’t have to come up with the ultimate answer, but I would certainly think about that sooner. 

My recommendation: find small ways that AI helps your various systems - become comfortable with it, learn about it and from there you’ll figure out how to expand it further.

Gilad Berenstein - Utrip

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Second, I would think about focus. Ultimately, our core focus at Utrip hasn’t changed – personalized travel experiences -  but I would really focus on individual phases of the lifecycle at first and really hone those before working on the platforms width and variety of experiences. We sort of did that backwards at Utrip, so I would certainly do that differently.

Lastly, I would spend a lot more time getting to know small players in the travel industry early on. We spent a fair amount of time with the Expedias of the world and other big companies in the beginning, getting to know their needs. But ultimately, there’s a huge part of the market in the middle. We were ready for that portion of the market before we were ready to work with Expedia or TUI or someone like that. I would have learned their needs upfront and been able to accelerate our revenue growth faster by really understanding our small clients, who are likely to be our early adopters.

Your father is an AI engineer. As you’ve been developing Utrip for the past several years, how has his background influenced you?

With my Dad, his influence is less about influencing me right now, but it’s more about me as a kid. I was able to understand early on that one day AI would be available to all of us. There’s no reason why one has to be an MIT engineer to interact with AI on a day-to-day basis. My dad’s greatest contribution was really giving me a familiarity and comfort level with predictive technology and a vision to where it might go in the future. Obviously, my Dad has been a very supportive advisor, as well as an investor in the company, but he’s his own entrepreneur and has never actually worked at Utrip.

What’s the best part about your job?

That’s a really hard one, but my absolute favorite part is dreaming about the product and helping travelers see the world every day. We’ve helped well over 20 million people go on trips that are unique and personal, and that is the thing I am most proud of.

What’s something our readers might not know about you?

I was born in Israel and am a crazy foodie. As far as anything travel related, this past March I visited four continents in four weeks!