Anyone who plans to travel to an event knows the story well. If the event is here, how far is the nearest affordable hotel? And, if I need to get to the event and back, what will that cost me?
Viata, a new Seattle startup, knows your pain and has just launched its new mapping tool to help you find your way and calculate your travel time and cost.
Traditional mapping tools are great at finding hotels. They also do a decent job of finding the location of the event. But what if there is more than one event that you’re trying to get to?
Before Viata, it was a time-consuming copy-and-paste effort in Expedia or Hotels.com. It involved a lot of trial and error without the advantage of being able to stand there in a 3D landscape and understand that things in the real world don’t always line up with what you thought the map showed.
Case in point. Many years ago, a person who shall remain nameless was certain that the Luxor in Vegas wasn’t that far from the hotel he was staying at. The scale of Vegas is a pretty tricky thing, especially since the scale of these properties is so off-the-grid that ordinary calculations are useless. One could walk miles and never get any closer. And yes, this is the voice of experience.
Enter Viata. Type in the city you are visiting and a few destinations on your itinerary, and the site will generate a triangulated map of potential hotels along with travel times between locations by car, bike, mass transit or on foot. The site makes all the calculations for you based on your preferences, itinerary, and interests.
Viata is the brainchild of Ken Aragon, co-founder and CEO, and his mom, Cecilia, a professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering. The two operate out of the university’s CoMotion Lab.
The two originally planned to use the underlying tech used for real estate listings as their starting point. But then it hit Ken that travelers often prioritize the cheapest hotel option, even if it’s farther than their points of interest or the sites where games were going to be held.
Unfortunately, the “cheapest” option wasn’t necessarily the most cost-effective. Once you add in the cost of travel from one place to another, that “cheapest” hotel ends up being a budget buster because transportation was the highest-cost item.
“We want to visualize that so they can really easily see the hidden cost in transportation and avoid making bad decisions,” says Ken.
After winning a $100,000 grant from the Washington Research Foundation to help commercialize the technology, Viata partnered with Expedia to integrate their 500,000 properties worldwide into the Viata platform. The startup will make money through a revenue-sharing agreement if a user books an accommodation through one of Expedia’s travel sites.
Aragon said he likes working with his mom, the company’s chief technologist.
“One of the most critical factors in a co-founder is trust, right?” says Ken. “And when you’ve known your co-founder for literally your entire life, that foundation is as rock solid as it possibly could be.”