We're building Travecta, the missing layer between local tours and the world's travel platforms
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We're building Travecta, the missing layer between local tours and the world's travel platforms
We're building Travecta, the missing layer between local tours and the world's travel platforms
was posted by Thomas Bangert, Katina Moldovan
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Featured on Aug 4, 2026 (1 month ago).
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I've spent my career in travel (previously at TripAdvisor, lastminute.com and Amadeus), and one problem never went away. The most authentic multi-day tours, the ones run by local operators who genuinely know their destination, are almost impossible to find and book through the big platforms. A huge share of multi-day tours still lives offline, in PDFs, brochures and long email threads. The operators are brilliant. The distributors want fresh, differentiated product. And yet the two sides rarely meet, because the plumbing that would carry that product to the world simply doesn't exist.
That's why we built Travecta.
We're the technical infrastructure layer that connects local tour operators with global distribution partners like airlines, online travel agencies, tour operators and cruise companies. Our AI takes the messy, offline content operators already have and turns it into structured, bookable, machine-readable inventory, then distributes it through a single connection. What Stripe did for payments, we're doing for multi-day tours.
We're deliberately not an OTA, not a marketplace, and not a discovery platform. We never own the customer and we never touch the margin. That matters for both sides of this community.
If you're a DMC or local operator, it means you stay in control. You own the product, you set your net rate, you deliver the tour, and your relationships stay yours. Onboarding is as hands-on or as automated as you like, from a simple manual upload in your supplier dashboard to full API, MCP or XML. In most cases we go from PDF to bookable in days, not months. You keep doing what you do best, and we make you bookable everywhere your future guests already are.
If you're a distributor, it means access to real, verified, multi-day supply that sits outside almost every existing distribution system, delivered in a clean, structured, connectable format. No scraping, no chasing PDFs, no reformatting. Every operator is vetted by our team, human to human, so the trust layer is there before you ever load a tour. One connection, and a whole category of product opens up to your customers.
We're early, and that's the fun part. 400+ operators are onboarding across 40+ destinations on five continents, and our distribution beta is open by invitation. Every week we learn something new from the operators and distributors we work with, and the product gets sharper because of it.
So here's my ask to the room, both sides of it.
• If you run tours, get in touch and let's onboard your product as supply. I'll personally make sure you're looked after.
• If you move distribution, reach out and I'll get you access to the beta so you can see the supply for yourself.
This industry only ever works when the new things and the old things stay connected. That's exactly what we're building at Travecta, and I'd love for this community to help shape it. Come find me.
👉 Learn more at travecta.tech and please share your comments and feedback!
Hi Thomas and Katina, thanks for sharing Travecta here with the Travel Massive community.
What an impressive start with onboarding hundreds of operators in so many different destinations. Any early insights from these conversations with operators and types of experiences and tours that are getting converted into the pipeline?
Also, congrats on being a finalist at the FutureTravel Summit Pitch Competition. I'll be there and I can't wait to see your pitch and cheer you on!
Thanks Ian, and thanks for having us here.
Two things stand out from the operator conversations so far.
The first is how multi-day tour content actually arrives. There is no common standard in this category:
- Hundreds of operators, and close to as many ways of describing the same thing
- Product comes in as PDFs, brochures, spreadsheets, web pages and email threads
- Ways of pricing can vary from market to market
That variety is a large part of why multi-day has stayed hard to distribute, and it is what our ingestion layer was built to handle.
The second is where the work sits. Itineraries are the straightforward part. The detail that makes a tour bookable takes longer:
- Net rates by season, by age group and by pax band
- Room allocations and pricing
- Minimum and maximum group sizes
- Departure patterns and guaranteed departures
- Cancellation, amendment and payment terms
Much of that lives in the operator's own systems and working knowledge rather than in a distributable format. Structuring it properly is what makes the product usable on the distribution side, and it is the piece a distributor cannot reconstruct from a brochure.
On what is coming through, it is a broad mix of multi-day itineraries, mostly a few days to a couple of weeks, across small group, guaranteed departure and private FIT formats. Arival put 61% of multi-day supply still offline in their March report, and the conversations we are having are consistent with that.
Thanks for the kind words on FutureTravel. We will be in Barcelona for the Summit and we are looking forward to it.
Hundreds of startups applied to the FutureTravel Pitch Competition this year. Ten are going on stage. Travecta is one of them, and we pitch in Barcelona on October 29.
61% of multi-day tour bookings still happen offline. Demand is not the problem. Structure is.
A multi-day tour is the hardest product in travel to sell. Eleven days, six suppliers, tiered pricing based on seasonality, group size and age group, allocation, routing, payment and cancellation terms that change by departure date or group size. A skip-the-line ticket is one line of data. A two-week trip through Namibia is a thousand. That content lives most of the time in PDFs, spreadsheets and email threads.
Distribution is being rebuilt around AI and APIs at the same time. Airlines, online travel agencies and cruise companies are moving to source inventory machine to machine, and the assistants people will plan trips with are being wired up right now. Every category is getting ready for that except the one that carries the highest value per booking.
Travecta is the technical infrastructure layer that connects local tour operators with global distribution partners like airlines, online travel agencies and cruise companies. Unstructured supplier content in, structured bookable inventory out, through one API.
Supply platform live since March. 400+ local operators onboarding across 40+ destinations on five continents. Invite-only distributor beta since July. Wider distribution from Q4.
Thomas Bangert owns commercial and distribution, Radu Grigore owns technology and connectivity, I hold strategy and supply. Behind the three of us is a team that has built more in under a year than I thought possible- Teodora Radu and Vlad Butnaru.
A huge thank you to Future travel.
We look forward to the event!