🚫 OTAs Suck ✅ Building a Book Direct, Decentralized, Open-OTA ➜ 🚀 Operators Get Direct Bookings ✈️ Travelers Get Rewards for Booking Direct 💰 Anyone Who Refers Travelers Owns Them & the Revenue Stream They Generate.

🐥 I'm a startup founder, launching a direct booking travel platform for the AI agent era.

Why? Today, Online Travel Agent (OTA) commissions are draining 10's of billions of dollars out of the travel ecosystem. They enrich "Big Tech" and "Big Travel", at the expense of everyone else. I know because I helped them do it. For years I was a super-affiliate of Expedia and other big OTAs. I fed $100m+ in hotel bookings to the OTAs, generating $10m in commissions, but adding little of value to the ecosystem.

Now, I'm building a new travel distribution platform and protocol that enables travelers and their AI agents bypass the OTA middlemen and book direct.

👇 Want to be notified when we launch? Leave a comment in the featured post below titled "AI-powered community", or reach out and connect! 

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Previously...

🐣 I co-founded a venture studio. We launched 3 notable ventures:
 
1️⃣ 3Genius International. Network of travel booking websites. $100M+ in bookings and $10M+ in gross profit.

2️⃣ Moola.com. Multiplayer game. Grew virally to 450k community members, $7.6M economy. PCWorld's “Best Places to Waste Time on the Web”.
 
3️⃣ Locationary. Local data and community platform. Rewarded users for crowdsourcing local business data (eg. like for Apple Maps). $4.5M in funding. Acquired by Apple.

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🧠 Current Interests: AI, community, machine learning, travel, fintech, loyalty rewards, web3 / tokens / blockchain, creator & influencer economy, social commerce, marketplaces, network effects.

Arlen Ritchie

Happ

https://happ.travel

Evolving the in-trip experiences industry from fragmented web 1.0 to it's map-driven, full customer journey end-game.

CEO, Head of Product, Chief Engineer

Mission

- Oversaw execution of multiple development squads composed of tech leads and engineers
- Part people manager, part product manager, part project manager – load-balancing as needed between relevant mission need
- Main liaison between counterparts within client organization – product managers, engineering managers, leadership/execs
- System architect for cloud systems (.NET), specialized in marketplace and multi-sided businesses, stage/scale-architecture-fit, team efficiency and velocity transformation.

Senior Squad Lead, System Architect

Happ Social

Curated local events marketplace and onsite festivals platform pursuing the transformation of the events industry from ad-based to transactional.

• Showcased sustained unmet demand for curated, intent-based consumer discovery platform for local events and exhibits
• Achieved product-market fit with class-leading discovery model of engaged & retained consumers (native iOS/Android platform)
• Circumvented ticketing fragmentation with transactional business model in an otherwise impressions/ad-based, publisher-led industry
• Showcased viability of high-margin organizer promotion business model to power end-to-end marketplace (halted by COVID-19 industry freeze)

Founder (Product, Engineering)

Joist

Contractor workflow platform and home-owner renovation platform.

• Led product from Seed through launch of home renovations marketplace and significant Series-A raise.
• Oversaw product team of 3 (product manager, product designer and product engineer)
• Spearheaded major technical re-architecture of the Android platform in order to enable the platform to grow across multiple verticals (increase product scope potential without increasing cognitive complexity)

Product Lead

Foodo

Mobile takeout ordering marketplace for fast-casual restaurants. Grew to 50 restaurants in Toronto bootstrapped. Accepted into DMZ incubator.

• Built end-to-end category-leading consumer app (native iOS), restaurant tablet order management app (native Android), menu digitization system and internal CMS portal (web app).
• Designed both consumer and restaurant products (category-leading UX)
• Designed marketing campaigns (distribution through partner restaurant network)

CTO, Product Lead

Travelport

Helped build and architect Universal Desktop – a large next-gen agent booking system for airlines, hotels and car rentals connecting industry participants directly to one of the world's four large Global Distribution Systems the entire travel industry runs on.

Software Architect | Team Lead | Tech Lead

Google

Worked on the Webmaster Tools team to bring a new feature to the Webmaster Console product

taplio

The Battle

Arlen Ritchie

Marcel Bradea

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