Following the success of its Booking Booster Programme launched in 2016, Booking.com is doubling its efforts to support socially driven and sustainable tourism startups next year.
Two new initiatives will be launched – Booster Labs and the Booking Cares Fund.
The Booking Booster Programme entails a three-week accelerator in Amsterdam, which awards a total of €2 million in grants to social enterprise scale-ups.
A selected group of ‘scale-up’ social enterprises working within sustainable tourism will be invited to participate in lectures, workshops and coaching sessions. There will also be a “final pitch” in which startups can compete to win up to €500,000 from Booking.com’s designated €2 million fund.
After the three weeks, participating businesses will also receive ongoing coaching and mentoring from Booking.com, as well as opportunities to collaborate with some of the company’s other initiatives and experiments geared towards facilitating growth.
In 2016, its inaugural year, Singapore-based Backstreet Academy earned the top grant of €400,000. Backstreet Academy also won the People’s Choice Award at the WIT 2016 Startup Pitch competition last October.
Both Jamon Mok (Founder & CEO, Backstreet Academy) and Marianne Gybels (Manager, Booking Cares, Booking.com) spoke at the WIT Bootcamp 2017 in October to discuss the critical need for sustainable tourism startups in an era of rising travel.
Gybels argued that simply providing occasional funding would not be enough to support sustainable tourism startups. Like the startups the company is supporting, it too needs to make an active and concerted effort to develop a sustainable tourism ecosystem that can exist and continue to grow on its own accord.
“I’d make the fund revolving, so everyone can grow in scale and invest back again in the same travel space,” said Gybels.
Marianne Gybels & Jamon Mok at the WIT 2017 Bootcamp discussing the Booking Booster Programme
The two new initiatives for next year – Booster Labs and the Booking Cares Fund – are an evolution of the Booking Booster programme.
Booster Labs is a weekend course geared to earlier stage startups. Over the course of three days, 10 to 15 startups will take part in hands-on workshops, lectures from startup and sustainable tourism professionals, and mentorship. Similar to the Booking Booster, startups will get the chance to pitch their businesses to win grants between €10,000 and €25,000.
The second Booster Lab is set to be hosted in Tel Aviv in March, 2018, with applications opening on December 11, 2017. The first edition was held in Barcelona.
The Booking Cares Fund is a separate €2 million fund specifically geared towards non-profit “innovators and change makers”. It is designed to fund “ambitious ideas to truly transform the sustainable tourism industry.”
These ideas will be awarded with grants between €100 and €250k based on their grant applications, which will be judged on a project’s potential to produce meaningful change that can scale. The projects must be backed by data and be able to produce measurable results. Applications for Booking Cares are already open (as of December 4, 2017).
For more information, visit: https://booster.bookingcares.com/
