People come back to the places that remember them.
That's the whole idea behind SayTrip. Here's where it comes from, and who's building it.
Valerie Bucher, Founder & CEOThe hotel
I grew up around my family's hotel at Faaker See in Austria. The guests who came back every summer weren't the ones with the best rooms. They were the ones we remembered: the dog's name, the corner table, the children I waited all year to see again.
A family hotel remembers by instinct. A travel business with thousands of customers can't. SayTrip is how it can.
Berlin, day one
I studied computer science at TUM in Munich and started as a software engineer at Capgemini in Berlin, on a communication product used around the world. On my first day, the lead of the infrastructure team took the time to set up the whole project with me.
His name was Michael. Remember him.
London
I went to London for an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at UCL, and spent the year talking to the industry: agencies, large travel companies, corporate travel managers. Everyone talked about personalisation, and everyone missed the same ingredient: who the trip is for. You only learn that in conversation, and a travel business has thousands of them.
It's all there, in every call, voice note, email and chat. Almost none of it is kept. And it's the one asset no competitor can copy.
Vienna
Everyone said London was the place to start a company. I came home instead, to build SayTrip next to the people who'd use it.
Our first customers were in from the first meeting, and that changed the job. Travel businesses would trust us with their customers' conversations, and that takes the two things SayTrip can't exist without: infrastructure at scale, and security. One name kept coming back: the person who had spent his career on both. I called Michael. He was in, and left his job to join as co-founder and CTO.
He spent years keeping global platforms secure and running at scale. That's how he builds SayTrip, from the first line of code.
Valerie Bucher
Michael Mayer