When you get to the ripe young age of 20, you’re bound to collect lots of stories – not only about the past but lessons for the future.
As WiT marks its 20th year in 2025, we turn the spotlight on our community, our tribe pioneers and leaders, to tell their stories and share their views on the evolution of online travel and technology.
We ask them to look back on the past and their early days, reflect on the present and why this moment is pivotal for online travel and get them to imagine the future, the next 20.
This special WiT Studio series, “Conversations On Turning 20”, is the collective story of WiT.
As a Chinese saying goes, 以古为鉴，可以知兴替
“By using history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of things.”
Episode 4: Stephan Ekbergh, Founder & CEO, Travelstart
Born and raised in Sweden and now living in Cape Town, South Africa, this Swedish entrepreneur has had more near-death experiences than probably the number of years WiT’s been around.
A man ahead of his time, he got into the online travel business in the mid-1990s with Mr Jet – actually wait, before that, he built the largest consolidator in Sweden called International Tours. And wait, there’s another company he built called Final Call.
But it was the arrival of the Netscape browser that made him realise this was where the future lies and that’s when Mr Jet came into being, and then he got jetted off (fired in other words) by the investor. With $25,000 in his pocket, he wondered what he should do next – the last thing he wanted actually was to start another OTA – but then he got told by his wife that was the only thing he knew, and so he’d better do that.
Thus was Travelstart born.
As for “The Next 20”, Ekbergh sees the dawn of a new Renaissance for travel, saying, “During the Renaissance, art and science went hand in hand. Artists used maths, anatomy and perspective to make their work more realistic and scientists and engineers worked with them to discover and experiment with new stuff and materials. Leonardo da Vinci, and artists like him, were pushing the boundaries of what was possible. The mix of creativity and curiosity really expanded the horizons of everything at the time. And this is exactly where we are right now.”
Drawing on his past life as a deejay, he sees AI as the ultimate sampler tool – and says the future will be hundreds, if not thousands, of small companies that will come along to slay giants.
