A travel booking can begin with the modest ambition of getting to a meeting and end with twelve browser tabs, three versions of the same fare and a sudden interest in staying home. Vajid Jafri has spent much of his working life studying the machinery behind that experience. His companies have changed names, customers and business models. The recurring subject has been the distance between the travel options that exist and the options a buyer can actually see.
Today he is founder and CEO of myRiva, the corporate travel marketplace previously called Onriva. Earlier chapters include Excambria, cFares and Mondee. Read together, they suggest a career built around a persistent irritation: buying a journey ought to require less detective work. The interesting part is how many different ways he has tried to address it.
Three itineraries, one telephone line
Long before the current enthusiasm for AI travel assistants, Jafri was named alongside Sajid H. Jafri on a reservation software patent issued in November 1998. Its title included “multiple virtual agents.” Its setting included a personal computer, a server and a dial-up connection. The software used preferences and rules to retrieve travel options and present priced itineraries quickly. One version offered three choices.
Three is a wonderfully human number in a document about reservation software. Enough to compare. Few enough to finish. The patent described a practical concern that has survived several generations of computers: users should not have to keep trying the same request to reach a useful result. The equipment dates the document. The impatience barely needs updating.
The early reservation work also complicates the usual account of a founder discovering a market. Jafri had been working on the act of choosing well before myRiva existed. A preference entered into a computer was already something he wanted software to understand. The ticket was the transaction; the decision before it was a problem worth designing around.
From a granted reservation-software patent to myRiva’s Canadian launch. Different systems, a recurring concern: help the traveler choose.
The fares that were somewhere else
By March 2001, Jafri was running Excambria, which gave agencies and corporations online access to inventory from roughly 100 airline consolidators. About 2,000 agencies and corporations had registered, according to reporting at the time. Much of that inventory had previously lived offline. The web could show only what somebody had taken the trouble to connect.
This was a less glamorous task than selling the romance of travel, but a consequential one. An available seat does little for a buyer who cannot find it. Excambria’s marketplace offered another route to inventory, with agencies using it without a fee and suppliers paying for transactions. Jafri was working on who could reach the fare, as much as on the fare itself.
A 2002 version of Excambria’s Margin Maker product brought another consideration into view: the agency’s existing working life. Installed inside an agency or corporation’s own network, it combined searches of reservation systems and internet fares while leaving agents able to use familiar commands. It also connected transaction information to back-office systems. A new tool still had to fit the desk where the work happened.
The wholesale club in the departure lounge
At cFares, where Jafri became chairman and CEO, he experimented with the commercial arrangement around access. In 2007 the company described a membership model for certain fares, drawing a comparison with a wholesale club. There is something pleasingly unromantic about approaching air travel through the logic of bulk shopping. The destination might be Paris. The business model had errands to run.
The details went beyond charging a subscription. cFares paid airlines for fare content, reversing the usual expectation that a search business would seek payment for sending customers their way. It was also bringing wholesaler and consolidator inventory online. Jafri told interviewers it was implementing content arrangements with 20 airlines, although he did not name them. Those were the company’s plans in 2007, a snapshot of a particular experiment.
A separate pricing mechanism let participating airlines respond to competing fares on a route. An airline could set a rule placing an offer a specified amount below a rival. cFares also gathered information about purchases and the alternatives customers considered. Here was another version of the same interest: a booking system could do more than put a list on a screen. It could change how suppliers competed for the booking.
These businesses put Jafri close to several sides of one purchase: the agency searching, the airline selling, the intermediary holding inventory and the traveler deciding. Each had reasons to care about the transaction. Each saw a different part of it. His subsequent companies would continue trying to join those views.
A larger business behind the ticket
In September 2011, GTCR partnered with Jafri, Doc Klotz and Prasad Gundumogula to form Mondee. At formation, the business acquired SkyLink, cFares and ExploreTrip. It later added C&H International. The project combined technology with airline consolidation, serving agents who sold discounted international tickets. Jafri’s earlier cFares chapter had become part of a broader distribution business.
GTCR’s spring 2012 account described approximately $1 billion in gross bookings after the C&H acquisition. Gross bookings measure the value of travel sold; they do not tell you the company’s revenue or an individual founder’s wealth. The useful point here is the change in scope. Jafri had moved from building access to inventory toward helping assemble a business around its distribution.
Five years before the introduction
Onriva was established in 2016, with its next-generation marketplace launching in September 2021. When Jafri discussed it publicly that November, he explained that the business had spent years keeping a low profile. “We were still in stealth mode,” he said. There is a certain efficiency in working on travel searches while making your own company rather difficult to discover.
The marketplace brought multiple booking channels into one interface and used traveler information and company policies to guide choices. It also placed Jafri back inside a familiar tension: increasing the available inventory makes the system more useful, provided it can help the customer navigate the result. Otherwise the reward for connecting everything is simply a longer list.
His colleagues at that stage included technology executive Mike Remedios and former Marriott digital executive George Corbin. Jafri was assembling people with experience across different parts of travel and technology. A distribution business touches several organizations before a traveler ever sees a confirmation. Building it requires an understanding of more than the final screen.
A person at the other end
In a February 2022 interview, Jafri grouped his approach under three words: selection, science and service. The combination matters. A broad catalogue needs a way to make sense of it, and a completed purchase needs someone prepared to help afterward. He emphasized round-the-clock agents alongside predictive software. An itinerary is unusually capable of becoming somebody’s immediate problem.
He also argued that restrictive travel choices could reflect the limits of the booking technology, rather than the actual objectives of company policy. His proposed alternative was to let travelers see options while guiding them through rules tailored to the employer. It is a revealing product ambition: preserve room to choose while making the consequences of that choice easier to understand.
The company’s 2025 change of name to myRiva put personalization at the front of its public identity. The announcement emphasized understanding individual travelers and tailoring the experience. For Jafri, whose patent record already included software that learned travel preferences, this was a recognizable continuation. Even the most carefully arranged marketplace has to meet a particular person making a particular trip.
The trip keeps acquiring attachments
The 2026 announcements extend that idea into adjoining jobs. A February partnership with Mesh Payments connects booking information with expense and payment workflows. The stated aim is to carry transactions into the expense environment automatically, reducing the manual work of reconciliation. The traveler buys a ticket; elsewhere in the organization, someone needs that purchase to make sense in the accounts.
Later that month, ATPCO’s Routehappy brought virtual flight tours to myRiva, using Renacen’s 3D SeatMapVR technology. Customers could inspect cabin layouts, seating and amenities before booking. The company presented the feature as a way to make the flight itself more visible. A fare tells you what you will pay. A view of the cabin helps explain what you are buying.
In May, myRiva reported nearly 82% of bookings across participating carriers using NDC Direct Connect through Accelya. The qualifier belongs with the number: this was a company-reported share for those carriers, dated May 1, 2026. Later that month, a Groups360 integration connected corporate travel with real-time meeting-space availability. The meeting at the end of the journey was joining the booking process.
Then came Canada, announced in July 2026 as myRiva’s first international market, through Globespan Travel Management. The rollout included Canadian-dollar bookings, local travel content and regulatory requirements incorporated into policies. Expansion, in this telling, involved a collection of practical accommodations. A border adds details. Somebody has to make those details work together.
The warning he still remembers
For all the software in this career, Jafri’s most personal account of decision-making concerns advice he ignored. He has recalled pursuing a deal with TWA despite a warning from his mentor, Sir Freddie Laker. He went ahead and lost money. The experience left him with a question he still uses: what would Freddie say?
“What would Freddie say?”
Vajid Jafri, remembering his mentor Sir Freddie Laker
That memory gives the business history a useful human scale. Better information helps only if the person making the decision is willing to consider it. Jafri’s companies have kept working on the first part. His recollection of Laker is a candid reminder of the second. Even a founder devoted to better choices can remember the one he should have made differently.