loading...
Travly serves hotels as AI-tuned short videos – meeting travelers who pick destinations by how photogenic they look, not by star ratings.
ENTRY ANGLES
Picture-first travel discovery apps structured like short-video feeds (e.g., Travly, Unravel model) · Short-video feed format applied to expert/consultant discovery and booking · Short-video clips extracted from B2B sales calls for internal distribution to buying committees
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Short-form video content curation and distribution platform, Marketplace booking and transaction infrastructure, Video recording, editing, and clip generation technology
Travly wants to reinvent the way people discover and book hotels.
To do it, the startup built an app that looks and feels like TikTok – a vertical scroll of short videos showcasing different hotels. An AI engine tailors the feed to each user's preferences based on which videos they actually watch.
Scroll, watch, find something appealing, book it. Bookings currently run through Booking.com, which pays Travly a commission on completed reservations.
The most interesting mechanic: the videos are uploaded by other users. Anyone who posts a hotel video and generates a booking from it earns 5% of the booking value.
Right now, each hotel is represented by a single video in the feed – automatically selected from all user submissions for that property based on which one drives the best watch-through and conversion rates.
The feed can be filtered by price, free wifi, pet-friendly policies, review scores, booking frequency, Travly's own picks, and even Instagram popularity.
There's also a mood-based discovery mode: pick the feeling you want – tropical paradise, wild nature, luxury retreat, romantic escape, thrilling adventure, lazy weekend, cosmopolitan odyssey, and so on – and the app surfaces hotels that match.
One more feature worth noting: an "alternatives" section that recommends less-obvious destinations with a similar vibe to the expensive, overexposed ones. Instead of Rome, try Lisbon. Instead of Paris, try Budapest. Instead of Tokyo, try Seoul. Instead of London, try Krakow.
The founders have deep roots in travel content, having run roughly fifty accounts across Instagram and TikTok for years. During the pandemic – when people were taking virtual trips from their couches – and after it, as real travel bounced back, their communities grew exponentially. That's when they started thinking seriously about how to bring systematic monetization into those communities.
The result launched a few days ago. A few thousand users have signed up so far, with around 500 videos uploaded.
Travly plans to expand into flight search, local experiences, concerts, and other in-destination activities.
Unravel, which raised $1.25M and was [covered here](/review/ne-vylozhil-fotochki-schitaj-ne-otdohnul) last year, operates on the same short-video-for-travel-booking premise. Unravel is more developed – bookings happen inside the app rather than via external links, the catalog covers flights and experiences in addition to hotels, and its video contributors lean toward professional travel creators. That said, the line between a serious amateur and a professional travel creator is blurring fast.
Unravel's revenue model mirrors Travly's: revenue-sharing on bookings generated by creator content.
Travel doesn't have to be long-haul, though. Local travel – exploring bars, restaurants, and venues in your own city – is also a live market. Atmosfy ([covered here](/review/giganty-pokazali-nam-sposob-zarabotat)) built an app for exactly this: a short-video feed featuring local venues, with content uploaded by regular users. Booking and monetization are still early-stage, but one thing the founders have noticed is that people are increasingly using the app to *plan trips* – researching restaurants and nightlife in cities they're planning to visit.
That observation is backed by data. Social media now influences 75% of all travel decisions. A big driver is the rise of choosing destinations based on their photo and video potential:
- 57% of travelers simply enjoy capturing video and photos of places they visit.
- For 49%, the ability to produce great visual content is a primary motivation for choosing a destination.
- And 48% are openly motivated by the opportunity to show off on social media.
Finding destinations that look great on camera requires a different discovery experience than traditional directory-style booking sites. Travly and Unravel are built for exactly that search behavior.
Apps like these also reduce the friction of the research-to-booking process. Instead of toggling between TikTok for inspiration, Google for reviews, and Booking.com for availability, everything happens in one place.
Aggregation is another viable angle. Rather than sourcing original video content, a platform could pull existing travel videos from across the internet and layer booking functionality on top. That's the approach Layla ([covered here](/review/ogromnyj-rynok-vnov-otkrytyj-dlja-vhoda)) took – an AI trip-planning assistant that aggregates content and suggestions, raised €3M in its first round late last year.
The travel market is enormous – over $1T and still growing after a full pandemic recovery.
Most of the existing booking infrastructure is old. It was built around catalog-style discovery: filter by price, stars, location, then check if there's a video buried at the bottom of the listing page. That model doesn't match how people actually decide where to go anymore.
The shift is real, and it creates an opening for a new generation of travel discovery products built "picture-first" – the same way mobile-first design swept past desktop-first incumbents once smartphones became the primary browsing device.
The most direct play: build picture-first travel apps and sites, structured like Travly or Unravel.
But the short-video trend isn't limited to travel. The format is becoming compelling across many discovery contexts. Unikon ([covered here](/review/korotko-i-konkretno-luchshe-chem-dolgo-i-v-obshhem)) raised $1.91M in its first round on an app for finding mentors and consultants built as a short-video feed, where experts pitch themselves in short clips and users can book a one-on-one session or a webinar slot directly. Mica ([covered here](/review/chto-obshhego-mezhdu-tiktokom-i-b2b-prodazhami)), currently in Y Combinator, transforms recordings of B2B sales video calls into short clips distributed internally at a prospective buyer's organization – nudging more stakeholders toward a purchase decision.
The underlying question is which marketplaces, beyond travel, would become more engaging and more effective rebuilt around short video. The pattern is consistent: wherever static, text-heavy interfaces are the default and visual discovery is underdeveloped, there's an opening.