May 29, 2026 / By Vanessa Horwell
12 min read
SHORT TAKE: For travel technology startups serving aviation or the wider travel industry, their first challenge is seldom visibility. Instead, they need to understand which problems airline buyers want solved in the next 18-24 months, and how to tune their solutions to meet them. That's a strategy question, not a PR question, and it's the one we spend most of our time on.
Picture three travel tech founders meeting with buyers (or investors) this month. One is selling a global hotel chain protection against automated bot attacks on its booking engine. One is offering AI-powered crew planning and scheduling for long-haul airline groups. One is licensing algorithmic revenue management to mid-market OTAs, built on a proprietary big-data layer. All three have working products, reference customers, and a coherent pitch.
But all three are struggling to make enough headway with the procurement teams they’re talking to.
The product isn't the issue. Instead, there’s a mismatch between how they’re going to market and their buyers’ actual priorities for this year or next. The bot-fraud founder touts his platform’s detection accuracy, even though his first meeting is with the loyalty director, who’s worried about account takeovers of points balances. The crew-scheduling founder leads with optimization gains when the COO is trying to survive a pilot contract renegotiation. The revenue-management founder talks about model sophistication when the OTA's commercial lead has been told to stop spending on anything that won't show up in EBITDA within six months.
Ok, well, so what? Not every prospect is ready to sign immediately, mismatches happen, and no one bats a thousand. You can just focus on getting your name out there to widen your funnel and maybe onboarding some external consulting advice.
What a sector partner does that a generalist can't ?
Loyalty programs, even well-integrated and sophisticated ones, have typically operated adjacent to payments, mediated by separate systems, databases and teams. Points are accrued post-transaction, redeemed through a different channel, and reconciled later through a back-office process.
The Adyen-Talon.One combination has the potential to erase that differentiation and disconnect. As analysts noted at the time of the deal, the acquisition broadens Adyen's role beyond payments optimization to influencing the economics of the transaction itself by connecting customer identity to SKU-level promotions in real time.
When a points balance can be applied mid-cart by the payment processor, rather than affirmatively opted into by the customer or passed downstream after settlement, points start to look less like a deferred marketing reward and more like a genuine currency: a unit of value that is interchangeable with legal tender, handled by the same infrastructure at the moment of transaction. That’s significant, especially for travel programs.
The work is diagnostic before it is anything else
For the bot-fraud founder, the first useful activity isn't issuing a press release announcing the latest product feature. We unpack what the loyalty team at three target hotel groups lost to fraud last year, which security functions own the budget, and whether IT or commercial sits closer to the decision. The story your company tells then gets rebuilt around the operational reality those buyers live in, with proof points drawn from peer programs rather than generic threat statistics.
For the crew-scheduling founder, we identify which fleets are most exposed to the crew shortages and disruption costs running through industry commentary, name the operations leaders who own that pain, and find the language that distinguishes a sector-built solution from another AI vendor.
For the revenue-management founder, we show how the model performs against the metrics OTAs are reporting to their boards, because margin pressure in online travel distribution has shifted, and which numbers matter.
Media coverage doesn't come first in any of those scenarios. Coverage follows from a position that's been well-defined and honed on real-world outcomes. Chase headlines before you have the right story to tell, and you’ll do nothing but annoy trade publication editors and stall your growth cycle.
What 20+ years in the room gets you
A partner worth retaining has met the buyer before and understood why their last three vendors succeeded or failed. They know what the buyer says in private versus what they say on a panel. That insight shapes messages, generates industry resonance, and cultivates growth.
That’s what THINKINK delivers to travel tech startups – genuine advice without the consultancy price tag (or baggage), partner-level strategic guidance, and visibility where it matters.
Visibility becomes the easier part once the underlying narrative is fit to the room it needs to be heard in. That’s the difference between generating noise and building commercial momentum in a sector where buying cycles are painfully long, often political and deeply operational.
Get in touch with me if you want to discuss your startup’s growth plans and needs: vhorwell@thinkinkpr.com
