Acai Travel
- Founders: CEO Riccardo Vittoria, executive chairman Henry Chen Weinstein and CTO Pavel Pratyush
- Headquarters: New York
- Fundraising to date: $4.5 million
- Investors: Nauta, DraperB1, One Travel Ventures, Amadeus
Acai Travel CEO Riccardo Vittoria
When speaking with potential travel management customer clients, Riccardo Vittoria, CEO and co-founder of AI technology company Acai Travel, hears a universal challenge.
"Travel demand is back in full force and growing 5 [percent] to 10 percent a year, and they can't keep up with their operations because agents are very expensive, difficult to find and difficult to train," he said. "They are in an operational mess, and especially during disruption, it becomes a massive issue, and their service is scored very low."
Launched in 2023, Acai aims to enable TMCs to improve operational efficiency with AI-powered automation of both simple and complex tasks. Vittoria is no stranger to the travel industry, having developed 30SecondsToFly, an AI and messaging platform that American Express Global Business Travel acquired in 2020. Vittoria led AI efforts at Amex GBT after that but said he didn't plan on returning to the travel industry as an entrepreneur. The advent of large language model technology changed his mind, opening the door to address complexities that weren't possible before.
"Finally, we have the technology to cater to all this complexity across the board," Vittoria said.
Acai has built "agentic technologies to reconstruct the travel tech infrastructure," including a front-office agent, an AI supervisor and a back-office agent. The latter is the "most marvelous piece," Vittoria said, capable of handling changes, cancellations and exception management, including the ability to go into global distribution systems and performing those complex processes—including such tasks as splitting passenger name records or managing multisource bookings—with an understanding of both corporate and airline policies.
Those capabilities undergo rigorous testing for accuracy before being launched, he said.
With those AI capabilities, agencies can cut the time it takes per transaction, leaving agents able to process more transactions, or let the technology take over the simpler conversations altogether. That can be particularly useful in times of disruption, when the technology can predictively go through waivers and exchanges for customers to keep call centers from having a high load, he said.
It can also cut costs of call centers, as it can help with language translation as well as assist agents who are not trained as GDS agents to work in the systems, he added. Agents can describe what they want to accomplish in natural language, and Acai can translate that to the appropriate workflow in the GDS.
Vittoria said he expects AI ultimately will help agencies run with "full-stack employees," similar to what is happening in the software industries. "That will be someone who is tech-savvy, knows how to orchestrate different AI specializing in travel and can be a front-office agent, a back-office agent and a concierge for multiple countries with multiple languages—a superhero agent that can do it all," Vittoria said. "This is the trend that we're going to see in the next five years."
To date, Acai has raised $4.5 million in funding, including a $4 million seed round led by B-to-B software investment firm Nauta announced last November. In June, Amadeus announced it was taking a minority stake in Acai for an undisclosed investment amount, which Amadeus Ventures head Suzanna Chiu at the time said was a means of "equipping Amadeus to exploit the significant opportunities presented by generative AI."
Acai for now is targeting largely TMCs and online travel agencies in the mid- to large range, with announced TMC users including Altour, World Travel Inc. and Australian corporate travel agencies Platinum Travel Group and Connections Travel Group. TravelPerk also has tapped Acai with a focus on "assisting agents in bringing more value to customers," a TravelPerk spokesperson said. Acai operates on the software-as-a-service model, and Vittoria said revenue is on track to increase 50 percent this month and has been following a trend of doubling every quarter.
Acai head of sales Ron Glickman said the company has no intention of selling directly to corporate customers, outside of possibly corporate travel departments, some of which have been making inquiries. "We are not trying to own the relationship with the corporate traveler or the voice of the agency in talking to people," he said. "We are amplifying that voice and providing it more intelligence and power."
The company's customer reach, however, extends far beyond TMCs and OTAs, however. Vittoria said the company will be "heavily focused" on airline customers next year, with a few airline customers already onboard, and expanding into hotels also is on the roadmap. Even other AI-based technology providers, such as booking assistants and platforms for managing non-profiled travelers, are potential partners, with Acai providing support on servicing, Vittoria said.
At the same time, the company plans to deploy more features to make Acai capable of handling even more complex manual exchanges.
The company sharing its name with the antioxidant-rich fruit is no coincidence, by the way. While there were some side considerations in selecting the name Acai—starting with "A" gives it a high placement on alphabetical lists at industry events, and ending with "AI" provides some creative acronym opportunities—it really boiled down to something simpler for Vittoria.
"I love acai bowls, and it started like that," he said.