🚫 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

Royal Institute of Navigation

Chief Executive Officer

Chairman of the RIN Technical Committee

University of Cambridge

I teach a variety of courses in Computer Science at Queens' College, and I am the Director of Studies for the Part II and Part III students. I am also a founding fellow of the Queens' Entrepreneurial Society.

Bye-Fellow, Queens' College, University of Cambridge

Current research projects include: 
Infrastructure-free indoor positioning on a standard smartphone using SLAM and opportunistic sensing, reducing the computational load of smartphone SLAM schemes, gait recognition, new sensor processing schemes, an all-smartphone UAV, solutions to the E911 problem. 

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rmf25/

Senior Research Associate

FocalPoint

Director

President, CTO, Executive Director and Founder

Focal Point Positioning Ltd. was founded in 2015 with the aim of bringing accurate position and time to smartphones and autonomous platforms, indoors and out. Focal Point's team are building on over 100 years of experience in cutting-edge positioning technologies and are bringing game-changing new technologies to the world of positioning and navigation.

www.focalpointpositioning.com

CEO, Executive Director, and Founder

BAE Systems

Technical Lead for a number of navigation, tracking and sensor fusion programmes. Expertise in GPS-Denied navigation using novel methods including opportunistic radio signals.

Principal Scientist

Higher Scientist

During my PhD research I investigated and modelled the causes and effects of multipath interference on terrestrial opportunistic radio positioning systems. This work was supervised by Dr Peter Duffett-Smith and undertaken at the Astrophysics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory.

PhD Student

Cambridge Positioning Systems

PhD student

Dr Ramsey Faragher is the CEO of the Royal Institute of Navigation. He is a world-leading and multi-award winning expert in positioning, sensor fusion, and machine-learning for navigation systems. He is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a Bye Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge.  

He was previously the Founder, President, CTO and an Executive Director of Focal Point Positioning Ltd. where he led the development of game-changing new technologies to set new standards in GNSS, indoor positioning and autonomous positioning systems. He is the pioneer of the patented and award winning "Supercorrelation" GNSS signal processing technique that brought synthetic aperture processing to consumer GNSS chipsets.

Earlier in his career he was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where he developed the first online SLAM-based indoor positioning system for smartphones, and a Principal Scientist at the BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre where he developed the award-winning and patented NAVSOP opportunistic positioning suite and other GNSS-denied tracking technologies. In 2009 he won the BAE Systems Early Career Engineer of the Year award for developing NAVSOP. 

Ramsey has developed and recommended state-of-the-art improvements to the navigation systems of manned and autonomous platforms in the land, air and sea domains working with BAE Systems, MOD, ESA, RSSB and a number of SMEs. He regularly contributes to various podcasts and radio shows, writes for Forbes, and has also provided science advice for two television production companies.

Specialities: Deep-tech startups, GNSS signal processing, Opportunistic Radio Positioning, GPS-Denied Navigation, Multipath Mitigation, Sensor Fusion, Remote Sensing, Bayesian Inference, Autonomy, Machine Learning, Physics, Systems Engineering.

taplio

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Arlen Ritchie

Ramsey Faragher

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