Hugo Pellegrin

💸 Speakspots introduced Smart Budget, an AI-powered travel budget planning tool, aiming to help travelers manage expenses by comparing their budget with real-time market trends. Users receive personalized recommendations to book at the best dates and prices. Smart Budget analyzes flight, accommodation, and activity data to suggest strategic adjustments for savings, utilizing data from Skyscanner, Booking.com, Viator, GetYourGuide, and Civitatis, offering time savings and financial optimization for travel planning.

🚀 Vertical Aerospace secured a $90 million funding round, exceeding the initial target of $75 million due to high investor demand. Over $60 million came from new investors while Mudrick Capital contributed $25 million. The funds will be used for R&D, testing, and certification capabilities enhancement, with operational expense increases projected for the second half of 2025. The company, aiming for VX4 eVTOL certification by 2028, appointed aerospace veteran Dómhnal Slattery as board chairman.

🚀 Lufthansa Innovation Hub integrates AI travel assistant Swifty into the Line messaging app for Japanese customers in 2023, offering flight bookings for Lufthansa Group airlines. Swifty, accelerated by Lufthansa's startup program, handles business travel tasks—planning, booking, payment, and billing via chat interface. It's based on GPT-4 and marks the first development phase of an autonomous AI assistant. Customers can book Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa, and Swiss International Air Lines flights through Swifty using chat or voice messages.

📝 Cocohop, launched in beta after co-development with travel industry professionals, leverages artificial intelligence and collaborative tools for personalized travel offerings. Entrepreneurs Vincent and Molina Paulin aim to end standardized packages. The platform connects travel agents, DMCs, and travel planners, facilitating collaboration, communication, and customization of trips using a database with millions of tourist interest points. Users can interact, vote, and select trip components, with AI automating planning, generating travel booklets and quotes, and a conversational agent assisting professionals. Cocohop is collaborative, allowing customization and direct client engagement, and utilizes Google's Gemini AI for data enrichment and multilingual translations. Subscription fees range from €29 to €99 per month during the beta phase until June 2025, with bespoke packages for larger tourism entities. Cocohop aims to become the default travel organization solution, promoting local and responsible tourism, and plans to expand its professional network and AI solutions to personalize travel further.