Byway leverages artificial intelligence to enhance travel experiences by guiding travelers to take scenic routes and enjoy a slower, more picturesque journey
In March 2020, when the epidemic began spreading throughout Europe, Cat Jones, Byway’s only founder, decided to take the risk of starting a travel agency.
In the summer of 2024, her carefully chosen tour company, Byway, is announcing the conclusion of an oversubscribed Series A round of £5.04 million, or roughly $6.4 million at current exchange rates.
Jones is adamant that slower, more environmentally friendly travel is rising.
These trips, whose main selling point is that they are designed to be flight-free and involve traveling overland (and sea) by train, bus, or ferry, allow travelers to enjoy the scenery and avoid the crowds while unwinding in less-traveled areas.
She tells TechCrunch that growth has increased thrice yearly, with over 4,200 trips sold so far.
Environmental concerns are one of the main reasons travelers are looking for methods to cut back on flying.
As local communities battle the effects of over-tourism, several central European city-break locations, from Amsterdam and Barcelona to Rome and Venice, as well as well-known holiday islands, are becoming less welcoming to tourists.
After working as an investor at the London-based startup accelerator Founders Factory, Jones had both trends in mind when looking for a business idea. She worked at digital adtech startup Unruly for eleven years before leaving to become the global SVP for data in the executive team.
Her UK-based firm, Byway currently has forty employees. The development into new areas will be fueled by the Series A fundraising, led by Heartcore Capital, and will include participation from Eka Ventures and reinvesting angels.
Byway declared that it would hire additional people, mainly engineers, to increase funding for its in-house developed artificial intelligence-based travel planner technology.
Almost 60% of the package vacations that Byway offers are reserved online by clients using JourneyAI, the company’s in-house trip-planning software.
The remaining forty percent of sales are generated by a concierge service run by people, where employees converse with potential clients to create a trip that meets their needs.
However, Jones is optimistic that when more data sources are added, and its AI-powered recommendations are optimized, the vacation planner application at Byway will be able to handle more of the trip planning tasks.
Lovely but Tenacious
Jones had always enjoyed slower, more picturesque modes of transportation; she had never possessed a car and had always taken the boat to Ireland to see relatives.
Thus, she saw a genuine chance to plan “gorgeous” overland vacations, complete with breathtaking scenery and thrilling travel experiences like the exhilaration of a mountain railway or boat ride or the slower-paced novelty of sleeper trains with dining cars and this she has done with Byway.
