8 Most Inspirational Female Founders in the Travel Industry

The number of female entrepreneurs has grown in recent years. Actually, the US had 12.3 million businesses owned by women in 2018 compared to 402,000 in 1972. The increase has changed the landscape because now you can find female founders in male-dominated tech industries.

Female entrepreneurs and leaders in travel technology is a stepping stone for their younger counterparts. They help these younger future leaders take chances by not fearing new challenges and opportunities. There are fewer growth opportunities when one doesn’t challenge themselves, so it’s important to take risks.

The following are the 8 most inspirational female founders in the travel industry who have made several twists and turns to rise to the top.

Alexandra Zubko

The fastest-growing tech startup, Triptease, was founded in 2013 to make the booking process easier. The increase of online travel agencies has blocked the link between hotels and customers. Thus they are not able to price their room profitably because of limited access to data.

Through Triptease, a hotel can earn an extra 10% of direct revenue at a lower cost compared to OTA commissions. Through Convert, a guest can book directly with the hotel, thus allowing it to handle its most valuable guests throughout their entire journey.

Further, using the startup’s cloud-based software as well as its real-time pricing tool, a hotel now prices its rooms profitably and has increased ownership of the entire process, thus eliminating online travel agencies. Alexandra is the founder of TripTips and worked with Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) before joining the startup world.

Allison Page

Allison Page and Joel Montaniel cofounded SevenRooms in 2011 and raised $21M venture capital from Providence Strategic Growth, Comcast Ventures, and Amazon to grow their business. With her finance background, Allison saw a gap in the hotel F&B operations, such as the lack of knowhow and resources to run personalized marketing campaigns.

Through email automation and segmentation from SevenRooms, F&B managers can easily and quickly add customizable tags to customer profiles. They can then run marketing campaigns based on certain rules to segments such as positive reviewers, high-value regulars, first-timers, and more.

Therefore hospitality operators can leverage data to deliver exceptional experiences, build direct relationships and increase repeat orders and visits, thus driving their revenues and profitability.

Amanda Szabo

The serial entrepreneur is the ResortPass founder based in Los Angeles. It’s challenging and expensive to find new hotel guests in a hyper-competitive market. It’s also not a walk in the park to market your hotel to travelers.

However, Amanda felt that marketing to locals was a bit easier and less costly, thus the founding of ResortPass. Therefore the company partners with hotels to help guests that haven’t booked a hotel room to get Spa Passes, Day Passes, and Cabanas, thus enjoy these amenities and the pool. The goal is to help minimize overcrowding in these places and still help hotels to make profits.

Amelia Gain

It’s almost impossible to run a hotel successfully without modern software. On the other hand, opting for outdated tech systems cost the hotel operator a huge amount of money and time that they could otherwise spend on creating an exceptional guest experience. Preno’s founder and The Spire Hotel CEO, Amelia Gain, developed a system to bridge the gap and make hotel owners ‘ lives easier.

Preno provides hotel management software that easily connects with leading tools and simple to use. The hotel management system has a user-friendly interface and works well with independent hotels with up to 300 units or rooms.

Janine Williams

Providing hoteliers with retail technology solutions helps them maximize impulse sales in hotels’ gift shops and pantries. Impulsify has been providing these solutions since 2013 and has been named the top-rated solution on multiple occasions.

Janine has brought innovation to the travel tech industry by helping hotels either add or refresh their entire retail program for their brand or portfolio. So, the company allows operators to avoid certain pitfalls made in the hotel retail program, starting with assortment, pricing, merchandising, and SOPS.

Jennifer Wong

With her real estate and finance background, Jennifer founded Stay Wanderful in 2016 but later renamed it LaaSie.ai. Her unique concept is to power transaction moments such as booking a hotel room through the website with personalized perks and incentives like Amazon credits, free Uber, or VIP access.

Therefore the platform motivates customer loyalty to help the brand drive member engagement, increase net and create dynamic customer relationships through personalized, instantly selectable rewards. Since customers want instant gratification from every brand interaction, LaaSie.ai uses big data and AI to help companies to offer incentivized and rewarded loyalty.

Robin Deyo

Robin and her husband founded Cendyn to help hotels leverage data to grow guest loyalty. Through eProposal, hotels can accept group business RTPs through its website. While eProposal makes a small part of Cendyn’s entire portfolio, it has, however, helped hotels to grow their group business.

This hotel CRM platform has over 30,000 customers in approximately 143 countries. Some of its products include hotel digital marketing services and software.

The Cendyn’s cofounders took a back seat when Accel-KKR bought a majority stake in the startup in June 2019. Their focus now is on De Joux Holdings that invest in projects in the hospitality industry and philanthropic activities.

Tammy Farley

In 1998, Tammy cofounded The Rainmaker Group that offers profit optimization solutions to resorts, hotels, and casinos. Revintel, grouprev, and guestrev are some of its three key products.

Revintel is a data aggregating and analyzing tool that produces actionable insights such as measuring performance in comparison to corporate goals and also to driving revenues.

Grouprev is a tool that helps hotel operators optimize group meetings, thus maximize revenues. It does this by growing function space revenue, group room rates, and managing catering calendar and property sales.

Guestrev is a revenue management tool that grows room rates by allowing the hotel to set rates according to the projected demand.

Recently Cendyn acquired The Rainmaker Group to enhance its digital offerings.