Travel Perks

Aviv had already tasted success selling Hotel Ninjas to Booking.com in 2014, a software company for hotel management that gave him deep expertise in travel. After staying on at Booking.com for a period, he and two co-founders spotted something obvious that the entire industry had missed: business travel was completely overlooked. "Everybody's looking at leisure travel because that's the fun part," Aviv explained. "You're going on fun trips in Hawaii or Barcelona. But if you turn your look to business travel, which is the same size of leisure, right? You have a 1.5 trillion dollar problem that nobody's trying to solve." The opportunity was staggering—business travel represented roughly 50% of the global travel market, yet it was dominated by clunky enterprise solutions, travel agents, and outdated systems. Nobody was building a modern, consumer-friendly experience for it.

They launched Travel Perks in 2015 with a radically different approach. Instead of charging companies or travelers directly (the old enterprise model), they built a free platform and monetized through commissions paid by suppliers—hotels, airlines, and credit card companies. It was the Expedia/Booking.com model applied to business travel. Aviv emphasized their three core competitive advantages: the biggest bookable inventory in the world (using a combination of modern APIs and legacy GDS systems to find the absolute best prices), consumer-grade UX that was "one order of magnitude better" than enterprise competitors like Oracle, and uniquely, human intelligence—a 24/7 in-house support team ready to handle problems when something went wrong on a trip. That last point was not an accident; it was DNA inherited from Booking.com, where Aviv had learned that 70-80% of employees were in customer support.

The early days were brutal. Aviv's previous startup, Hotel Ninjas, had struggled to raise capital because hoteliers didn't feel the pain strongly enough. But Travel Perks was different. Business travelers and corporate travel managers universally hated their travel solutions. "I cannot find one person who says, I'm in love with my travel agent," Aviv said with a laugh. The pain was real and universal. Growth came almost entirely inbound—over 90% of accounts came through word of mouth, organic referrals, and content marketing. They weren't doing paid ads initially. They went to conferences, published content, and relied on existing customers referring new ones (with a referral reward program in place). Social media ads worked well too, but the core engine was inbound: people discovering them because they'd heard from peers that business travel didn't have to suck.

The 10X year-over-year growth spoke for itself. About 12 months before this interview, they were processing roughly $2.5M in GMV (gross merchandise volume) annually. A year later, they'd climbed to nearly $25M, and were on track to break $100M in GMV that year. On each dollar flowing through the platform, they captured between 5-10 cents—a healthy take rate driven by hotel commissions (typically 15-20%), smaller airline fees, and credit card interchange fees. They also introduced a premium tier: $10-12 per trip for faster service and consolidated monthly invoicing, though the bulk of revenue came from the freemium supplier-commission model. Large enterprise deals looked different—they'd negotiate bulk discounts (roughly 20% off premium rates) for high-volume customers, turning a $100K annual commitment into roughly 10,000 trips. What didn't work was the old playbook: paid customer acquisition wasn't their engine. Their superpower was that the product solved a pain point so obvious that people organically told others about it.

By the time of this interview, Travel Perks had raised over $30M (including Series A and Series B), assembled a team of nearly 100 people with roughly half in engineering and product, and was growing at an almost unbelievable clip. They weren't profitable yet—the money was burning through payroll and team expansion—but Aviv was confident and patient. "Nothing great happens without taking risk," he said. The long-term vision was clear: own the business travel category the way Booking.com and Expedia owned leisure travel, but with a modern product that actually delighted users instead of frustrating them. Aviv himself remained deeply technical, still writing code and "geeking out" with the team. His motivation had evolved beyond the money from his Booking.com exit; it was about solving a 1.5 trillion dollar problem and proving that enterprise software didn't have to be ugly or painful.