Navigating Tech Wave in Travel with Ivan Saprov, CEO and Founder of Voyagu

In this interview, we spoke with Ivan Saprov, CEO and Founder of Voyagu.

Can you share with us what inspired your decision to delve into the travel industry?

I love to travel, and as a well-traveled person, I know firsthand the highs and the lows of what travel is now, and this has inspired me to envision what it can be. Travel is a huge, diverse, and growing industry, and the fact that tech is rapidly penetrating the industry makes it even more interesting.

On the other hand, the inevitable truth is that travel has started to lose excitement and is becoming a hardship. Practically all industry players, especially travel professionals, admit they experience enormous challenges in providing quality service for their clients and are losing their earnings. The growth of big travel tech direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms is squeezing the travel agents out. The agents survive, but they are unable to compete with the price and speed of the big brand platforms. Logically, they can’t do it because they have no access to technology at all, or when they do, they can only access inert systems, which is not helping either. At the end of this battle, they are losing money and even trusted clients.

For travelers, what starts as an expectation of a smooth journey with a welcoming and exciting travel experience, in reality, turns into an act full of challenges and burdens. The number of cases of poor customer support is skyrocketing, leading to negative client experiences and big disappointments. Travelers are overwhelmed by generic, standardized interactions and the loss of empathy and human connection.

I believe in reestablishing the excitement and joy of travel. Creating a way of retaining all the great knowledge of industry professionals, their human empathy, and connecting them with the right tech tools that can strengthen their competitiveness, enhance the efficiency of their work, make them excited about doing their job, and help them earn more money as well as giving amazing experiences for their happy clients, inspires me to reinvent, innovate, and lead the changes.

Building on your strong understanding of the trigger points of the industry, what is Voyagu and what are Voyagu core competencies?  Who are your clients, and how do they benefit? 

Voyagu is a travel management platform and a marketplace that connects clients with travel advisors to reduce costs, enhance travel organization, and provide quick access to human support. To do this, we have integrated two users, clients, and travel advisors, into a single platform.

Our core competence is our deep knowledge of the ideal customer journey and client expectations from the travel advisor, as well as our comprehensive understanding of the travel advisor’s perspective and workflow.

By focusing our platform development on a holistic solution for both, we provide clients with personalized offerings that are cheaper than online prices and support travel advisors to work with more clients and get higher earnings. Similarly, this helps travel suppliers to sell unoccupied travel inventory, redistributing travel demand and supply. The platform also backs the automation of post-booking and workflow effectiveness to free up time for the travel advisor to provide better client support and empathetic problem-solving. There are analogies of platforms in other industries that have achieved a single system integration of two users, but not in travel.

It seems like taking the leap to introduce an innovative travel management platform is paying off. Can you share specific instances where your travel expertise played a pivotal role in shaping Voyagu product strategies?

I have learned the industry inside out and spoken to many travel professionals and clients. When working on the idea of the Voyagu platform, we collected travel agents’ insights, needs, fears, pains, and dreams, and created a “face” of the travel agent community that adequately represented them. Also, I formed a strong team with experienced travel industry professionals and diverse talent from outside the industry and started leading our platform development and critically challenging delivery vs expectation.

My knowledge of the process details and caveats of the workflow of the travel agents and a vision for the ideal customer journey supported the confidence that technology can take care of repetitive routine tasks, eliminating complexity, leaving more time for quality customer interaction, and providing the agents with the necessary speed and competitiveness. As a result, this pushes the growth of their earnings while increasing their efficiency through automation.

Our platform is really built by travel experts for the travel experts. This opens a positive perspective for the agents, and it is also a way for new agents to join the industry.

Integrating technology in traditional industries can be challenging. How will tech change the industry, and what is the role of Voyagu?

There is a growing sense of encouragement for integrating technology into the industry.

In the past years, despite the rapid growth of DTC travel platforms, the necessity for travel agents persists. And while travel agents can’t complain about the leads and impact on demand, what radically changed is the clients’ expectations. Travel agents have felt that increasing exposure to DTC travel platforms and the ability to use the airlines’ online self-service booking calibrates the reference points for the clients, putting pressure on the agents’ competitiveness and the actual value they provide.

This sets the motivation to adopt technology faster and erase the “traditional” ways of working.

Clearly, AI will play a dominant role in the industry’s technological advancement, and it will influence the modification of the systems, the tools, and the interaction process. Through this, AI will have an enormous impact on the client experience.

The momentum toward achieving critical mass in using AI technology is inevitably growing, and it will revolutionize the industry.

With the overall stronger adoption of AI by the general public and the possibility of using AI-powered virtual assistants for travel, it can make certain tools redundant, such as client travel portals or some apps.

As for the role of Voyagu, we enjoyed a bit of a headstart with development while the industry was still recovering from the pandemic. However, the tech revolution is coming to the travel world, and our mission is to help travel agents succeed in this new reality, which includes big data, AI, and other things that can seem scary. Based on what we know, there is a segment of travelers that still prefers working with agents as long as their offering is competitive. With our help, agents can make that happen.

There is a definite excitement of AI. Do you see potential tech downside with the further growth of AI?

In fact, it is a commonly discussed and polarizing topic. There are a number of statements that say that AI will cause the loss of jobs. However, the numbers prove there is a more positive spin-off rather than the downside. During the pandemic, the travel industry lost a significant part of its workforce, and until now, it has not been restored. This is one of the reasons for the present degradation of the quality of travel services and travel experience. Reaching the level of expertise in some industry-specific, high-qualification professions takes many years. The availability of such experts is at risk of dropping to a critically low number.

In response to this problem, technology can help to compensate for some work areas and speed up the specialization and acquisition of expert status.

For example, in the sector of travel agencies and individual travel agents, there is a pandemic-driven permanent loss of over 30% of the workforce. At the same time, there is continuous growth in travel demand from travelers. Technology is the way to compensate for the gaps and support the growth of demand.

If we look specifically at Voyagu, further development and the use of AI will allow us to grow even faster and be more competitive. We could use the time and additional resources of the travel experts to put human wittiness and creativity to enrich the NPD process and create cutting-edge travel products and offerings.

You lead Voyagu to be ahead of the curve. How do you stay abreast of industry trends, and how has your ability to anticipate changes given Voyagu a competitive advantage? 

Assertiveness, travel nerdiness, and audacity.

Looking at the industry landscape just as a reference point and never as a given frame or a limiting factor. I encourage the Voyagu team to be open-minded and hungry for ideas. We monitor new emerging products and business models in related and different industries.

It is very important to share our industry expertise, and I value the opportunity to be an active contributor to the travel community.

I am building connections and expanding my professional network. Listening to business experts and gathering different industries points of view, I pick up insights and ideas.

It is important to consider the opinion of industry experts, but mostly as a source of information, not as predictions of whether a product will succeed or fail.

I have been attending industry events for a number of years and have established a good network. In 2023, we took a big step with our research project, “The State of the Industry According to Travel Advisors”. In the conducted research, we aimed to collect firsthand insights on the changes in the industry, challenges and future outlook.

This project gained Voyagu high visibility within the industry, as well as with top executives in the US and internationally. Increasing exposure for Voyagu helps our credibility and attracts new potential partners.

Recently, Voyagu joined the Sabre Developer Partner Network. It is another step to broaden the visibility of our platform within the travel community, offering more possibilities for travel agencies and agents to partner with us to increase their efficiency and grow their revenues.

As a startup company, you are focused on growth and scaling up. What challenges do you foresee going forward?

One of the challenges of fast growth is potentially overlooking things and the risk of making mistakes. Young companies are focused on growth potential in order to gain a sizable presence for their novelty products. There are limited operational resources to safeguard potential mistakes.

Risk-taking is a great ability we share in the team. We accept that mistakes can and will happen, but not the same mistakes twice.

We know your passion for data and insights. With the integration of machine learning in Voyagu, data obviously plays a crucial role. How does the platform utilize data, and how do data insights inform key decisions within the company?

We love data and making fact-based decisions. The data from our platform allows us to be fact-driven when it comes to performance metrics, modeling, and understanding existing products and offerings.

For our innovation funnel, we focus more on speed to market and go with MVPs to collect reality check learnings and then adjust and apply these learnings to the product improvements. It is important to be in the market with a good product, ahead of the competition, rather than wait for the perfect product and lose the opportunity.

What are your plans for international expansion? How will you leverage your success in the US to launch Voyagu and tailor the platform to new geographies and cultural nuances?

If we look at the big picture, the U.S. International premium travel market scores as one of the biggest travel markets worldwide. With the influx of affluent boomers and Gen-X, it will gain healthy growth for decades.

Midterm, the US market remains our priority, and there are new emerging trends and travel patterns to fuel our growth.

For example, in 2023, we saw a triple-digit growth in intergenerational travel – the grandparents traveling with the grandchildren. It is an opportunity for us to gain deeper insights and offer new, exciting travel products.

Growing a company requires the ability to have access to talent. What is your approach to building the team and getting people engaged?

People are engaged and deliver great results when they understand and share the company’s vision and goals, when they adopt and like the way of working, and when they have transparent, candid communication across all levels of the company.

In our team, unlike big corporations with poster-printed values that are impossible to change, we “recycle” values and live the ones that stick and are true to us.

We have a number of talented people who have joined us from outside the industry. This is where our open culture comes in. The best way to help new top performers from outside the industry onboard faster is to translate industry jargon for clear and easy communication. We give plenty of context, structure the onboarding process for faster adoption and direct impact on business growth. Our developed, tailored training program is an evolving instrument and we regularly assess newcomers’ knowledge progress.

Looking forward to the evolution of the travel industry, what new trajectories of innovations do you see coming and impacting Voyagu and other companies?

There are unlimited opportunities for innovations.

The industry is still at the starting point of travel and fintech alliances. There are multiple potential directions for the future, with stronger adoption of cryptocurrency and the possibilities to use more of “BNPL” for travel payments. Both are well present in other categories and there is no reason why travel should be an exception.

The increasing emphasis on higher quality and convenience in travel trends calls for even more ways for banks, travel agencies and airlines to coordinate and create a better travel experience.

There are immense opportunities to use generative AI. It has demonstrated significant potential for client support and it will continue to expand to other areas. Also, there is opportunity with travel planning, for example, introducing more creative visual itineraries with travel outputs, like a full trip preview, with video and interactive content.