Hotailors in Luxembourg: A purchase order with Vodafone Global worth €100,000

Hotailors, a growing B2B travel technology company, has won a global purchase order from Vodafone Global courtesy of Tomorrow Street at Arch Summit in Luxembourg. Hotailors was awarded the grand prize of €100,000 as best solution in the ‘Future Tech’ category.

Hotailors, a rapidly growing SaaS company, creates solutions for booking, approving and expensing corporate travel. Their segment of interest? Well, they help all businesses, but specifically focus on managing the extended workforces of global companies. These extended workforces include non-permanent employees like contractors, vendors, expert networks, etc. The start-up’s well-known partners include Google, Microsoft, Amadeus, Kiwi and EY.

Hotailors’ solution won over the star-studded judging panel, comprising sharks, dragons and investors, to take home the ‘Future Tech’ award. Tomorrow Street, a joint innovation venture between Vodafone and Technoport, the Luxembourg national incubator, brought together top companies and talent to celebrate all things innovative. Hotailors not only impressed Tomorrow Street, but also representatives of Vodafone Global, the British telecommunications company, who will move to collaborate with the growing company.

“We are doubly happy. We’ve won the prize for our idea. But we also showed that we have a complete working solution, attractive to an increasing number of the world’s largest companies. And we are ready to work for them” – said Filip Błoch, CEO and founder of Hotailors.

Arch Summit is one of the most prestigious European start-up events. For two days in early April, representatives of technology companies, startups, investors and board members of the world’s largest corporations met in Luxembourg. Arch Summit’s focus is on advancing technologies, and attending companies are encouraged to explore solutions to help them potentially deliver new organisational value.

Arch Summit this year hosted a number of speakers, from high-ranking government officials, to futurists and even Nobel Laureates, but amongst the panels and talks of new technologies, 60+ startups battled it out in pitch-heats across both days. The companies were divided between Social Impact and Future Tech, with the latter category boasting 40+ entrants alone. Hotailors’ CEO, Filip Bloch, CTO, Maciej Stopierzyński, and Business Development Manager, Daniel Flynn, were presented with the award on mainstage by Leymah Gbowee, recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her work during Liberia’s 14-year civil war.

The victory in Luxembourg is just the beginning, as Hotailors trade their cash prize for something move valuable. The chance to work with yet another large, global client in Vodafone. “Given the option of cash, or to work with a world-leading company like Vodafone, the choice is pretty clear for us,” said Filip Bloch, “we’d like to demonstrate the kind of value we deliver consistently to our other large clients”.

And the opportunity to work with Vodafone is just the first step in the 2019 business goals of Hotailors, a high-growth company looking to 10x its revenues this year. Key to reaching this — international expansion, as the company scales sales activities in Warsaw, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, and Dubai. “Hotailors is growing quickly, and our target markets are a reflection of where we feel value can be delivered, and where our advisor network feels best placed to make a real impact for us,” said Michał Szeksztełło, COO at Hotailors.