Alex Zaretsky

I was pleased to take part in the “Closing the Week” program on the Economy Channel this past Thursday, hosted by Hagai Golan. During the discussion, Hagai asked an insightful question about the economic rationale behind the product and whether it makes sense to add such protection even during more stable periods. This allowed me to emphasize a point I often make especially recently : the company and the product have been operating for over a decade and were created out of a genuine economic need, long before the COVID-19 pandemic or the current geopolitical tensions. Offering a “Cancel for Any Reason” cancellation service gives smart consumers the tools to book in advance and save tens, and in some cases even hundreds, of percent compared to last-minute prices by adding only a few percentage points in cost, in exchange for financial protection on their booking, up to only a few hours before departure. Smart planning isn’t about predicting disruptions - it’s about being prepared for them. In today’s travel economy, flexibility is not a luxury, but a smart financial decision. #TravelIndustry #SmartTravel #BookingConfidence #TravelEconomy #TravelTech #ConsumerBehavior https://lnkd.in/e3jUiSM6

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Most AI travel products are built by people who understand AI, but haven’t really had to deal with the full complexity of travel: live inventory across fragmented suppliers, changing pricing, legacy distribution infrastructure, real production constraints. That part is easy to hide in a demo. In production, it shows up very fast. In travel, generating a good recommendation is already hard. But making it work against real inventory, real pricing logic, and real infrastructure is where things get much harder. This category won’t be won by better models alone. It will be won by teams that understand the full stack. That’s the lens we took building Via.ai. And that’s also why having Lutz Vorneweg, Amadeus’s SVP Strategic Partnerships, involved matters — not for optics, but to help ensure what we build aligns with how travel actually works in production. That combination is rarer than it looks, and much harder to build than most expect.

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When an AI agent books your trip and gets it wrong, nobody blames the algorithm. They blame the company. That's a fundamentally different accountability model than anything travel has dealt with before. A search result that shows the wrong price is an inconvenience. An AI agent that books the wrong flight — because it misread your policy, or weighted your budget over your schedule, or worked from supplier data that was already stale — that's a trust failure. And it lands on the brand. I'm building an agentic travel system right now. The hardest part isn't the technology. It's the layers the AI has to navigate simultaneously: traveler preferences, budget limits, company travel policy, agent interests, and supplier inventory that lives in caches that aren't always current. Every one of those layers has to be clean, consistent, and machine-readable — or the AI makes the statistically reasonable choice that's still the wrong choice for this traveler, on this trip, under these constraints. Most travel brands were never built for that. They were built for search. Present options, let the human decide, liability stays with the traveler. Agentic AI flips that. The AI decides. The company is responsible. That's not a technology upgrade. It's an organizational reckoning. Is your company ready to be accountable for what your AI agent chooses? #TravelTech #AgenticAI #FutureOfTravel #TravelIndustry

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What happens when the most fragmented part of travel finally becomes connected? Our co-founders, Amit Shamni and Yaniv Green, recently joined Danny Roup at TV10 Israel to discuss: • Why the experiences industry has remained fragmented for so long • How Bridgify is making 1M+ experiences across 180+ countries accessible through one infrastructure • How AI is transforming travel personalisation while infrastructure remains the key to making bookings actually happen Watch the full interview below. #TravelTech #AI #Experiences #Innovation #Bridgify

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Another AI-first travel platform launched this month. We all know it won't be the last. Every few weeks, a new company promises to reinvent travel with AI. But AI in travel isn't just a chatbot that helps you search. Soon it will take over the repetitive manual tasks and it is already changing how systems talk to each other too. Integrations between systems are being built faster and smarter with AI tools. That's not a prediction - it's already happening. None of that works without real inventory, real pricing, real commission structures, and real accounting - all synced and current. We've spent 36 years building the infrastructure travel businesses actually run on. AI isn't a replacement for a good travel platform, it's what a good platform lets you build on top of. Let us show you how here: https://lnkd.in/djGM9VfU #TravelTech

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TTS BUILDS TECH FOR USERS & BUSINESS: Discover what TTS platforms can do for businesses. Advanced travel training, data driven climate assessments and mobile travel apps that generate benefits for users & businesses. Check out the portfolio: https://lnkd.in/gVGsdAPh #startup

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Etraveli Group has acquired Israeli AI flight booking startup Wenrix for an estimated $200-$300 million. The acquisition aims to enhance Etraveli's B2B platform with AI-driven tools for price prediction, automation, and flexibility in the global flight booking market. Wenrix, founded in 2018, will continue to operate independently and plans to expand its workforce from 80 to 130 employees by the end of the year. Wenrix CEO Amir Balaish said the acquisition preserves the company and allows it to grow, highlighting their competitive edge in price prediction and automation. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gsEQVEiH 📰 Subscribe to the Daily AI Brief: https://lnkd.in/epHYTU3i #ai #artificialintelligence #ainews #aistartup #aifunding

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When I say we’re building the first Experiences Infrastructure Layer, I mean this: We don’t sell tours. We power them. Experiences are one of the most fragmented markets in the world. We turn that fragmentation into infrastructure enterprises can rely on. One integration. Global supply. Local relevance. We handle aggregation, normalization, payments, availability, and fulfillment, so brands can focus on distribution, loyalty, and their customers. Good infrastructure stays invisible. If you don’t notice it - it’s working 🎢 Bridgify

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Partnership Announcement: Arbitrip x Isracard 🤝 We are proud to share that Isracard, Israel's leading credit card issuer and financial services provider, has selected Arbitrip to power its new travel solution for loyalty members. Through this collaboration, Arbitrip's advanced technology and hotel accommodation platform is fully embedded into the Isracard digital ecosystem. This integration provides a seamless, premium booking experience for millions of users. More BIG news are dropping later this month—stay tuned! 👀

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