Visiting a new destination and don’t have a local to show you the interesting sites or the places to hang out for a drink or a meal? Enter AVUXI, the startup that “ranks the popularity of every place on earth” so you can choose which to visit while making your travel arrangements.
The London- and Barcelona-based company, which is competing for the Innov Summit award at the ongoing Phocuswright Conference, has just received an undisclosed amount in investment from Amadeus Ventures.
Data from Crunchbase reveals that this latest investment brings its total funding to €687,000 from an angel round of €175,000 in October 2016, R&D grants and other angel investors.
This is how AVUXI’s TopPlace technology works. It shows the most popular areas within a city through easy to understand heat map overlays. This enables travellers searching for a hotel on an OTA or metasearch site to intuitively understand the most popular places in the city they are about to visit.
AVUXI’s ranking scores assign location ranking to each hotel and vacation rental. Travellers can even search for popular places by category such as eating, shopping, nightlife and sightseeing.
To deliver all this data to travellers, AVUXI’s platform analyses and ranks geolocated data including comments, photos and reviews from millions of users through more than 60 sources including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia and more.
AVUXI’s ranking scores assign location ranking to hotels and vacation rentals
“Whenever we talk about travelling, location is essential. What we tried to do with Amadeus is to help people save time and have a better and more personalised experience by having the bookings and the information on the same site,” says Alexis Batlle, CEO of AVUXI.
Katherine Grass, head of Amadeus Innovation & Ventures explained why AVUXI was invited into the Amadeus Ventures portfolio: “Finding ways to improve conversion for our customers is a key focus as a company. By building a culture of collaboration with developers, start-ups, partners and our own staff, we are unlocking new innovations that can deliver real value to our customers and travellers.
AVUXI’s customers include KAYAK, eDreams ODIGEO, SnapTravel, Only-apartments and WayBlazer.
Amadeus Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Amadeus IT group, is a travel venture fund that invests in travel and tech startups. The fund, launched in 2014, includes startups such as Fly, Bluesmart, BookingPal, Yapta and Olset.
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