In a sea of AI travel-planning apps, a new startup called Boop aims to redefine the space with a new approach: turning social recommendations into bookable itineraries. Instead of getting a random AI-generated travel plan, the app offers users access to itineraries from real people who went on real trips.
When someone takes a trip, Boop uses AI to quickly turn their trip into an itinerary that others can copy and personalize, mainly by looking at location data and metadata from photos they share with the app. The idea is to build a network of shared itineraries that people can monetize, giving travel creators another way to earn money from their recommendations.
The startup was founded in February by Nancy Li Smith, who previously led AR/VR innovation at Meta and Microsoft and served as executive vice president of growth and strategy at physical AI startup BrightAI.
Smith came up with the idea for Boop after feeling like there wasn’t a way for her to remember or share her own travel recommendations efficiently.
She also wanted to address the stress and emotional labor that often come with planning travel, especially since women make roughly 80% of travel decisions and often feel pressure to make every trip perfect.
“Women are majority of the time the planner in the in the relationship and in the family and the friends groups,” Smith said during an interview with TechCrunch. “There’s this pressure to make every trip amazing, not only for yourself or your partner, for your family, for your friends. All these years of the emotional and logistical labor for free. Boop is now solving this so that we can capture this easily without people doing anything.”
Instead of having to scour TikTok for recommendations, sift through hundreds of reviews, and pin ideas across Google Maps, users can access tested and loved itineraries from creators and friends.
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“Boop is the first AI travel companion that’s built on social trust,” Smith said. “What that means is, the moment you start going on a trip and start exploring and roaming around, Boop basically remembers your trip in the background, so all your stops, your photos, your reservations, and in the background turns this into a beautiful, shoppable itinerary that friends can now actually use.”
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