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Snaptravel is an online travel agency headquartered in Toronto, Canada. The company provides hotel bookings through messaging platforms. Snaptravel works with companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Twillio to apply chat technology to travel.

History
SnapTravel was founded by Hussein Fazal and Henry Shi in San Francisco in October 2015. Following the sale of his digital advertising startup, AdParlour, Fazal and former Google engineer Shi started working together. They created a chatbot to help people make travel bookings, released to the public in July 2016.

The founding team is comprised of Hussein Fazal and Henry Shi. Fazal graduated from the University of Waterloo’ s Computer Science program. He went on to work in software engineering and co-founded AdParlour in 2008. Shi, SnapTravel’s CTO, is an alumnus of the University of Waterloo and Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Google in 2015, he founded uMentioned through the University of Waterloo’s Velocity program.

Funding
2016 Seed Round : Led by Bee Partners, with participation from Hedgewood.

2018 Series A Round : Led by inovia Capital, with participation from NBA athlete Stephen Curry, Telstra Ventures, Bee Partners, Lightbank.

Product
The SnapTravel product is comprised of a chatbot to user interface experience flow. Users define their hotel search using their preferred messaging platform (ie. SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Amazon Alexa, Slack). NLP processes the hotel request, and the chatbot will send the user a link to a GUI to book their hotel & room. After completing a hotel booking, the messaging platform is used to communicate with SnapTravel about the hotel stay and to access customer support.

Awards and recognition
SnapTravel has been referred to by Condé Nast Traveler as ‘The Best New Way to Get a Hotel Deal’. SnapTravel has also been covered by Forbes, USA Today , the Seattle Times & The New York Times.