Many companies are now trying to use AI chatbots, other than ChatGPT, in different industries — especially in the consumer sector. Berlin-based startup Layla is banking on this trend to build an eponymous chatbot (along with an app) that suggests new travel destinations. It can also help them when it comes to bookings.

It was founded by Jeremy Jauncey, the founder of travel agency Beautiful Destinations with millions of followers across social media platforms, and Saad Saeed, co-founder of grocery delivery service Flink.

According to Jauncey, the company wanted to bring a new solution to the travel industry based on their experience on social networks and building tech products, over a call with TechCrunch.

Having invested so much time over the last 10 years quite deeply embedded in social media and the creator economy, we felt travel discovery needed something fresh. We recognized that post-pandemic, users were making very significant decisions about where to travel based on what they saw on Instagram and TikTok and harness that," he said.

As of today, the company goes public with its app and its chatbot, while Layla has already gotten thousands of followers on Instagram via Beautiful Destinations' networks. "The Instagram chatbot does a great entry point," the founders added.

Users can also message Layla on Instagram regarding destinations, temperatures of those places, the best time to visit, things to do, flight options, and hotel options. The bot also brings videos from the creators, sourced from the Beautiful Destinations network, which will give you a different perspective of a place.

According to Saeed, the application will nag you to download Layla's own app on Instagram for a couple of rounds of the conversation. From the application, users can create any number of lists, which they can share with their friends and have other, separate conversations with Layla about other trips, besides others. This also means that people can share more richly presented videos and ticket prices and hotel choices.

According to Jauncey, on average, a person visits multiple websites for all things related to travel advice from inspiration to the booking phase. And with Layla, the founders want to shorten that journey.

Layla has partnered with Booking.com to display hotel options and with Skyscanner to display flight options. It currently is starting off with a fee sharing on these transactions as a revenue stream, but with scale, the startup is also open to more money-making avenues, including personalized advertising opportunities.

Company Raisings
The firm secured a €3 million in seed investment led by the firstminute capital which has founded by lastminute.com's co-founder Brent Hoberman and M13, among other investors also involve Booking.com's co-founder Andy Phillips, co-founder of Skyscanner Barry Smith, as well as entertainment star Paris Hilton.

Layla believes its uniqueness is in bringing forth different kinds of content and not having a website-like structure where users have to apply filters to get search results. Although the company uses large language models to parse queries and display answers, it has built its own recommendation engine. Additionally, Saeed said that Layla is developing vision tech to allow it to answer questions such as "show me destinations which look like Mars" or surface recommendations that are similar to places in a photo or a video.

According to Hoberman, an investor in the project, firstminute invested in the idea because they were excited about the combination of using AI to answer travel questions and surfacing proprietary videos of different destinations to edge people to travel.

We feel Jeremy and Saad are the perfect team to approach and solve these two challenges. Through Beautiful Destinations' huge bank of content, Layla is differentiated against all its competitors out there," Hoberman said.

"Layla will face the challenges of educating customers about the type of queries that need to be fed so that AI can actually deliver the correct answers. And, at the same time, they need to be the best inspiration layer in travel if they have to distinguish them from other solutions out in the market."

The competition is preparing to put AI into their travel solution. Take Vancouver-based Pilot, for instance. They are in the process of developing a travel planner with an AI bias that would enable easy shareability of ideas about a trip with one's friends. Airbnb and Brian Chesky have already started playing around with AI-driven review summaries and are more than willing to pump the technology into other corners of the app. Kayak and Expedia both have their own GPTs or ChatGPT plug-ins, while travel publisher Matador Network's GuideGeek app flashes real-time flight information. Still, investors think "even a small lead matters now" as far as infusing AI in the travel sector is concerned.