PhocusWire’s Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2027: AI Moves From Novelty to Baseline

Two-thirds of this year’s cohort lean on AI — but the money is flowing to companies bolting it onto existing products rather than to AI-native upstarts.

PhocusWire and Phocuswright have unveiled the Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2027, an annual spotlight on the young companies analysts believe will shape travel in the year ahead. This cohort skews early stage, with roughly half the companies founded in 2025 or 2026, and the majority selling B2B — five are consumer-facing.

The headline trend is AI saturation. Two-thirds of the list lean into AI in some form, up from about 60 percent last year. The types of businesses vary widely:

• Blis AI, working in AI-driven data and location intelligence
• TurnStay, building for hotel day-use and turnaround experiences
• Flae Robotics, automating hospitality work with robots
• Passtination, an airline loyalty and passenger-centric infrastructure play
• Zerolook, technology for search optimizations
• Entravel Group and Equera, covering payment and distribution plus tours and activities

But funding data adds a sobering caveat. Phocuswright’s Mike Coletta noted AI-native startups — where the product depends entirely on AI — captured a larger share of funding rounds this year, about one in four first rounds since 2019. Yet their share of the actual investment dollars has not budged. Instead, money is concentrating in startups that bolt AI onto an existing product, which have taken more than 40 percent of equity dollars every year since 2024 — roughly double their share from 2019 to 2023.

“With AI everywhere, it’s clear that it doesn’t set a startup apart,” Coletta said.

Translation for travel operators: the innovation bar is integration, not invention. The startups most likely to matter in 2027 are less about headline AI and more about quietly improving how flights, hotels, loyalty and logistics actually run.