The Travel Tech Opportunity I Kept Seeing

Travel technology is one of the most competitive markets in software. Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Google Flights: the major segments are dominated by companies with billions in revenue and thousands of engineers.

And yet, after two years of building products adjacent to travel (Comensalaqui for restaurants, Brojure for travel stories, BorderBot for border crossings) I kept seeing a gap that none of these giants served: the last mile of the traveler experience.

The Last Mile Problem

Big travel tech solves the planning problem. You can book flights, hotels, and rental cars through beautifully designed platforms. The planning stage is over-served.

What's under-served is everything that happens after you arrive:

Local knowledge. Where should I eat? What's the neighborhood like? Is it safe to walk here at night? What do locals do on a Saturday? This information exists in the heads of locals but not in any accessible digital format.

On-the-ground logistics. How do I get from the airport to my hotel? Where can I find a SIM card? What's the tipping culture? What do I do if I get sick? These aren't planning questions. They're arrival questions, and the answers change by city, by neighborhood, and by season.

Equipment and services. I need a surfboard for two days. My baby needs a stroller for a week. I want a cooking class with a local chef. I need a guide who speaks English and knows the hiking trails. These are services that travelers need but can't easily find through the major platforms.

Community connection. Travelers want to meet other travelers and locals. Not in a hostel common-room way (though that's fine), but in a purposeful way: sharing experiences, splitting costs, finding activity partners.

Each of these needs is served by fragmented, often offline solutions. Guidebooks. Hotel concierge recommendations. Facebook groups. Word of mouth. The digital infrastructure for the last mile barely exists.

Why the Giants Don't Serve It

The last mile of travel is unattractive to large companies for structural reasons:

Low transaction value. A flight booking earns $50-100 in commission. A restaurant recommendation earns nothing. The economics of the last mile don't justify the engineering investment for companies optimized for high-value transactions.

High localization cost. Last-mile information is hyper-local. What works in Rome doesn't work in Tokyo. Building a comprehensive last-mile product requires city-by-city data collection that doesn't scale efficiently.

Discovery, not search. Travelers in the last mile don't know what to search for. They need discovery ("what should I know about this place?") not search ("find me X"). Discovery products are harder to build and monetize than search products.

Trust dynamics. Last-mile recommendations need to feel personal and trustworthy. A generic platform recommendation doesn't carry the same weight as a local's suggestion. Building trust at scale in a fragmented, local context is inherently difficult.

The Pattern I Noticed

Across Comensalaqui, Brojure, and BorderBot, a common pattern emerged:

Users wanted local, specific, timely information, not generic travel content. The best information came from locals and frequent visitors, not from algorithms or databases. The distribution channel was community: word of mouth, WhatsApp groups, personal recommendations.

This pattern suggested a product opportunity: a platform that connects travelers with local knowledge, services, and community. Not another booking platform, but a platform for everything that happens between bookings.

The Opportunity Ahead

The insight that the last mile of travel is a vast, underserved market of small, local needs came from years of building in travel-adjacent spaces and noticing what was missing.

Sometimes the most valuable product insight doesn't come from a single observation. It comes from a pattern that emerges across multiple products, multiple markets, and multiple failures. Each product I built taught me something about traveler behavior. Together, they revealed an opportunity that none of them individually could have shown me.

Specific last-mile needs (equipment for traveling families, local food discovery, cross-border logistics) are ripe for focused products. The founders who build for one specific traveler need, deeply and locally, will own the next wave of travel tech.

What I'd Tell Travel Tech Founders

Don't compete with Booking.com. The planning stage is won. The last-mile stage is open. Build for what happens after the booking is confirmed.

Go hyper-local. A product that perfectly serves travelers in one city is more valuable than a product that poorly serves travelers everywhere. Build deep local knowledge for one market before expanding.

Tap into local communities. The best last-mile information comes from people who live there. Build products that incentivize locals to share knowledge, not products that try to replace local knowledge with algorithms.

Start with a specific need. "Everything a traveler needs" is too broad. "Baby equipment for traveling families" or "surf equipment for visiting surfers" or "local food recommendations from residents": specific needs attract specific users who become evangelists.

The travel tech market is enormous. The last mile of that market is where the next generation of travel products will be built, by founders who understand that the trip doesn't end when the booking is confirmed.