📍When travel doesn’t involve a place to stay

Roamr just closed a $2.3M pre-seed extension to help companies rethink the basics of business travel: where people sleep.

Instead of hotels, the Irish startup encourages employees to stay with friends, colleagues, or trusted hosts - and then rewards them for it.

💬 “We’re paying employees, not hotels,” says co-founder Stephen Dooley.

It’s a tradeoff: lower travel costs, stronger connections, and fewer empty hotel nights on the company card. It’s scrappy, human, and probably not for every team. But it raises questions about what business travel actually needs to look like.

With budgets tightening and employee expectations shifting, companies are under pressure to make business travel more intentional.

While most startups in this space usually focus on optimizing bookings, Roamr went straight for the budget itself.

On our radar:

• Glampings.com raised €1M to grow its outdoor lodging platform. It's part of the continued niche push beyond hotels.

• ROH secured €8M to automate hotel payments. Still a space full of manual workarounds and spreadsheets.

• Trainline acquired Trenes.com in Spain to strengthen its rail and bus ticketing footprint across southern Europe.

• Visa2Fly raised $2M to make cross-border visa access less painful. Especially for travelers in emerging markets.

• Electra raised $115M to build ultra-short takeoff electric aircraft. Aiming to make fast, low-footprint regional hops possible.
  

He’s a bell, he’ a boy…

Hotels.com is introducing a new mascot: Bellboy. The character is a talking hotel desk bell with a jingle and a TikTok presence. Yes, really.

Hotels.com says it’s getting back out there after a quieter stretch and a strategy reset. In a sea of near-identical platforms, the goal is to be the one people actually remember. As Expedia Group reshapes its brand mix, Hotels.com is being positioned as the hotel expert again. This time with a voice, and even a face :)

To be honest it gives me Duolingo energy - and maybe that’s the point? In a space that rarely takes brand risks, they’re betting on personality.

I’m taking it as a reminder that in travel, being bookable isn’t enough - you also need to be memorable.

After 10 years of research, Booking.com just dropped its latest sustainability report. It’s short, so I’ll get straight to the point: people aren’t just thinking about the environment anymore. They’re thinking about how tourism affects the places they visit, and the people who live there.

A few highlights I wanted to share:

• Travelers are starting to think like locals.
  53% say they care about the social impact of tourism, not just the environmental one. That’s a pretty big shift in how people define “sustainable travel.”

• Locals don’t want fewer tourists. They just want things to work better.
  Only 16% think capping visitor numbers is the answer. Most would rather see better public transport, cleaner streets, and more support for their communities.

• Crowds are influencing how people book.
  Around 40% of travelers are actively planning around busy spots, either by going off-season or picking different places. There’s room here for better tools that guide those choices.

• People still want “authentic,” but they’re paying attention to how tourists behave.
  77% say local culture matters. But more than half also care about whether travelers respect customs or support small businesses. It’s not just about offering local, people want to see others engaging with it respectfully.

• Most people want to travel better, they just don’t always know how.
  84% say sustainable travel matters to them, but a lot of that intent gets stuck. That’s a product opportunity, not just a policy one.

Full report here if you want to dig in. Curious to see who in travel tech is going to pick this up and run with it.