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Happy Friday! I know we usually land in your inbox on Thursdays, but this one needed a little more love. Worth the wait, I promise.

This week we interviewed the Danish founder who built a tool for tour operators to run their ads automatically, without touching a single setting.

Alongside that, a creator platform born out of one founder's very real frustration after negotiating deals with brands like Microsoft and Airbnb on WhatsApp for nearly a decade. Plus a 560% airfare spike on Asia-Europe routes, a €64M seed round, and a few other things worth knowing about.

It's a good one - let's dig in.

Brazilian-startup Eluvi raises €415K to fix a gap the travel industry has been ignoring: connecting content creators with hotels, destinations and tourism businesses through a proper platform, instead of WhatsApp threads.

Rachel Spencer co-founded Eluvi after nearly a decade traveling 127 countries while negotiating brand partnerships with the likes of Airbnb and Microsoft through WhatsApp informal channels. That experience became the product.

The round is small, but their solution lets hotels and destinations activate a network of creators as a structured, repeatable demand generation channel, a scalable acquisition model with data behind it. And it opens the door to the long tail: the mid-size and niche creators whose audiences are smaller but often more engaged and more likely to convert than the top-tier names everyone is already fighting over.

💬 "Our ambition is to move away from awareness and influencer marketing toward a performance model, with traceability, predictability and direct revenue impact" said Rachel Spencer, CEO of Eluvi.

The platform already has over 15,000+ creators, 160 clients including Novotel, Radisson and Pullman, and 40,000 partnership requests processed. International expansion is already underway via multinational hotel groups using the platform. The roud includes iFood co-founder Fábio Póvoa, as an angel investor.

🇨🇭 Lobby raises $2.2M to automate group and B2B booking requests that still arrive by email at hotels, venues and airlines, cutting response times by 75%. GetYourGuide co-founder Pascal Mathis joins the board.

🇬🇧 Vuelo raises €64M in seed funding to build a travel booking platform that combines trip discovery, personalised recommendations and pay-later financing in one place. Think Booking.com with BNPL built in from the start.

🇩🇰 Opally raises an undisclosed angel round from a group of Nordic traveltech founders to grow its AI platform for hotel guest communications. The 23yo founder took it to 50+ hotels in 5 countries in just a few months.

🇺🇸 Navi AI raises $6M to automate pilot training debriefs. After every flight, its platform analyses cockpit audio and telemetry data to generate a detailed performance report, a process that used to take days of manual work. Backed by United Airlines Ventures.

🇨🇭 Eterniti raises €30M to expand its luxury villa and chalet rental portfolio across Europe, and North America. The group manages 800+ properties across 25 destinations and runs its own on-the-ground hospitality teams.

Understory is a booking and operations platform built specifically for experience businesses, like tours, tastings, cooking classes, surf schools. Over 900 operators across Europe use it to manage bookings, payments, guest communication and scheduling in one place.

The Danish company raised €12 million 6 months ago, and this week launched Bloom, an AI-powered ad tool that runs paid campaigns automatically for experience operators.

We talked to co-founder Lasse Kjær to find out how it works and where it's going.

What is Bloom and what problem does it solve?
Most experience operators are great at what they do, not at marketing. They have empty slots, battle scars from paying agencies hourly rates, and no time to figure out Meta Ads. Bloom solves that. It plugs into their Understory account, reads their inventory, and runs paid ads automatically. No high agency fees. No learning curve. You just turn it on.

Walk us through what happens from sign-up to first ad live.
Bloom lives natively inside the Understory backoffice. It pulls their experiences, availability, segment data and pricing, builds the ad creative and targeting from that data, and their first campaign goes live within a few hours. They don't touch a single ad setting.

What does Bloom actually do with an operator's inventory data?
It uses the real availability to decide when and what to promote. Slow week coming up? Bloom pushes harder. Sold-out weekend? It pulls back. The ads reflect the actual business in real time, and not a generic campaign someone set up 6 months ago.

There are agencies that do paid social for tour operators. Why is a tech product better than a human in this case?
Agencies are built for big budgets and slow cycles. They earn most of their money on meetings and project planning, rarely on outcomes. Bloom is built specifically for this segment, with a data foundation that applies an industry (even sub-category specific) playbook instead of a generic one. And with our tech and AI, we can deliver the outcomes at a fraction of the price. For a month, we charge what an agency charges for a few hours.

Will every booking tool need to include performance marketing eventually?
For now it's a niche, done like this, with the results we're seeing, we haven't seen it before. But with how AI is developing, we believe we have a real responsibility towards our customers to help them drive business results and start doing a lot of the work for them. Work that has previously been outsourced in a very suboptimal and fragmented way.

☕ Why do the world's coffee shops all look the same?
When local spaces start to lose their soul to some kind of global aesthetic, they stop reflecting the culture they came from. A café in London shouldn't feel like one in Tokyo or São Paulo - but more and more, it does. We're losing authenticity on so many levels, and the spaces that once gave a city its character are slowly becoming a blurry backdrop. This video is about coffee shops, but it could be about so much more 😮‍💨

I'm off next week, so enjoy the silence. We'll be back in your inbox on April 9th!

See you then,
Ana

The content of this newsletter is curated and published by Ana Metz, an innovation expert, passionate about tech and excited about the future of travel.

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