Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2023: Swayed

Swayed maps and shapes customer journeys in physical settings. By using guests’ device location, behavioral and transactional data, Swayed builds real-time intelligence on how people are spending time and money during their stay and then automatically uses that data to send contextual and personalized touch points to guests. We deliver our value exclusively via software and do not require the hotel to install hardware or guests to download an application.

Strategic goals for 2023
From a technical perspective, we are investing in improving our mapping and shaping of customer journeys. For mapping, this entails improving the accuracy of the existing location mapping signals and ingesting additional ones to help create a location score. In terms of shaping, we are investing in improving the personalization of the touch points we send to guests. This includes improving our segmentation and the timing of our touch points using machine learning.

From a business development perspective, our focus is in collecting a lot more data by expanding both in the hotel industry as well as new verticals such as airports and airlines. By gathering more data, we will be able to provide better data products such as benchmarking to our customers.

Lessons learned since founding

• Gen Z, millennials, baby boomers and Gen X use physical space/amenities in ways distinct to their generation.
• Hotels don’t need to upsell, cross-sell, and coupon to increase customer lifetime value.
• The pandemic accelerated trends that existed pre-COVID and didn’t necessarily create new ones.

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