group-travel
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Domio gave group travel a living room. The rent kept coming.
The apartment-hotel startup understood why friends and families disliked being scattered across hotel rooms. Its harder problem was paying for all that togetherness when travel stopped.
Marilyn Olson and the Art of Arriving Before the Problem Does
After decades communicating through corporate complexity, Marilyn Olson changed what she plans - not how she thinks. At Studio M Travel, the tiny details are still the whole assignment.
Janine Dawson Planned a Second Act Before She Planned the Trips
After 25 years of teaching people how to navigate products, change and work, the Philadelphia-area learning executive turned the same discipline toward a livelier syllabus: helping travelers meet the world on their own terms.
The Travel Agency That Still Picks Up the Phone
For half a century, CTA Travel has sold something booking engines struggle to package: judgment before departure, a human voice when plans wobble, and an itinerary built for the person taking it.
Nick Poggi Built a Travel Company Around the People Who Make a Trip Worth Taking
The TrovaTrip co-founder turned a messy group vacation into a three-sided marketplace. His enduring bet is simple: useful travel technology should make human connection easier, not try to replace it.
TrovaTrip Put Creators in the Tour-Bus Driver's Seat - Then Removed the Gate That Kept Smaller Communities Out
TrovaTrip found a clever way to turn online trust into offline travel: creators bring the crowd, local operators run the trip, and the platform takes care of the unglamorous middle. Its most revealing product decision was learning when not to demand more data.
Ted Clements
Ted Clements is the CEO of WeTravel, a San Francisco-based payments and booking platform for multi-day and group travel operators. He took the top job in January 2023 after co-founder Johannes Koeppel stepped aside to become Chief Product Officer and personally recruited him. Clements built his career at FareHarbor, joining as one of the first mainland US sales reps and rising to COO and acting CEO, helping scale the day-tour software company to 700-plus employees and an acquisition by Booking Holdings. In September 2025 he led WeTravel through a $92 million Series C round from Sapphire Ventures, pushing the company toward its goal of becoming the operating system for the fragmented multi-day travel market.
Marco Experiences
Marco Experiences is a San Francisco startup that turns the miserable job of booking a company offsite into something closer to a search box. Its AI scans 4,000-plus vetted hotels, negotiates group rates 20-40% below retail, and lets teams book rooms, meeting space, and meals with no phone calls, contracts, or service fees. Founded in 2019 by Suman Siva and Nick Freeman, Marco started life as a social-events product, pivoted through virtual experiences during the pandemic, and landed on group travel for distributed teams - now used by 5,000+ teams including Figma, Gusto, Ramp, and Notion.
Nick Freeman
Nick Freeman is the co-founder, co-CEO and CTO of Marco Experiences, a San Francisco and New York company that helps companies plan and book team offsites, retreats and group experiences. Before Marco he was one of the founding backend engineers on Instagram Stories, where he helped scale the product from launch to 500 million daily users, and he shipped Cortana for Xbox One at Microsoft. A UC Berkeley computer science and economics graduate, he left Brex in 2020 to build Marco with Suman Siva on the bet that, done thoughtfully, technology can build community. Marco now serves 800+ companies including Meta, Bain and Netflix.
Nikhil Sethi
Nikhil Sethi is the co-founder and CEO of Workgrounds, a New York startup using AI to automate the slow, phone-and-email world of corporate hotel room block booking. He is a repeat founder: alongside Garrett Ullom he built the adtech company Adaptly from a Northwestern dorm room into a 200-person business serving brands like PepsiCo, Fox, and Domino's before Accenture acquired it in 2018. After running global programmatic services at Accenture, he reunited with Ullom in 2022 to attack a problem they had both lived through - the painful logistics of booking group travel - raising $2.6M to launch Workgrounds.