The panel of travel gurus at the Get Funded Show

Dragon’s Den met the travel industry today at the ‘Get Funded Show’, one of the main features of the Eyefor Travel Summit. Four travel start-up businesses made it to the final having been selected from over twenty applicants. After a competitive round of pitching from the four very different and compelling businesses, Zoombu was voted as overall winner and Best Travel Start-up 2009. Other teams participating in the competition included Joobili, Tourdust and Travelwhere.

The Zoombu team won the vote for both categories of “idea and concept” and overall “investment potential” in SMS voting system where industry experts and experienced travel gurus were invited to vote. In a build up to the voting the teams pitched to four travel angel investors who grilled them on various aspects of their businesses.

The travel investors on the panel of ‘dragons’ were Dick Porter, Co-founder & Director of STA Travel; Hugo Burge, founder of Howzat Media and Executive Director of Cheapflights; Gerry Samuels, CEO of Travel Capital and Steve Endacott, owner of On Holiday Group. All four dragons spoke highly of Zoombu and in particular Hugo Burge said that “the Zoombu concept is great” and Gerry Samuels said “the team is very strong and has proved they can achieve a lot in a short period of time with very few resources”. He added that they have a “solid business model built around strong technology.”

Posted by Rachel

Tags: EyeForTravel, Get Funded Show

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.