Cautionary tales aplenty in Journera’s demise

Terry Jones, founding CEO of Travelocity and founding chairman of Kayak, met his match as founding CEO of Wayblazer, an early AI entrant in travel that struggled for four years before closing in 2018.

Last week, Jeff Katz, former president of Sabre and founding CEO of Orbitz, announced he was shutting down Journera, a “seamless travel” startup that, seven years and $36 million after its founding, never obtained enough traction to be viable.

It’s not that Web 1.0 veterans can’t compete in the generative AI era. When I spoke with Jones after Wayblazer closed, he suggested the company’s challenges were more rooted in financial engineering than software engineering. And in a conversation with Katz last week, he looked at a broader context for why Journera (and perhaps other travel startups) face an uphill battle.

That battle, he posits, is for the attention of companies that face an endless and inevitable series of crushing distractions.

Katz used the word “crushing” or “crush” eight times in the first 12 minutes of our conversation: crushing priorities, crushing events, crushing questions. At root, he believes, is something former Delta CEO Richard Anderson once told him: The difficulty with the airline industry is that management often thinks they’ve “really got it figured out,” but then some wild event happens.

“The travel industry is known for really pernicious external events,” Katz said. “They’re unpredictable, but they always happen.” As a result, pressing internal crisis management makes it difficult for companies to focus on external marketing solutions that may add incremental value.

His “customers are always faced with the five things they’ve really got to get done this month or this year,” he told me. “And then there’s everything else.” And in the fight for everything else, “you really have to be the most compelling thing in the universe, not just something compelling. That’s real.”

Journera’s pitch to suppliers was that it could provide leads based on a completed booking in a different travel sector that might have an adjoining travel component. Air partner United could provide information that tees up a passenger, who may not yet have booked a room, to hotel partner Hilton. Or, a hospitality company could pass along information that could open an opportunity for a ground transport company to pitch a ride between the hotel and airport. Seamless travel, in this context, was to bridge bookings between two suppliers and, perhaps, their apps.

But along the way, Katz himself faced external factors that became his crushing priorities. “[EU data privacy law] GDPR frightened people about the use of data,” he said.

Then, “a couple of famous brands had massive data breaches, and that slowed down things with data innovation. They didn’t want to do anything new.

“And of course, the pandemic, which put most brands into a coma for well over two years.”

Journera was a broad platform, which, similar to Amazon Web Services, leaves it to customers to decide how to deploy, Katz said. Were he able to turn back the hands of time, he “would probably think about a way-narrower set of applications” that would compete less for internal corporate resources.

He wonders about timing, as well. “Perhaps we were too early. Companies understand data much better now than they did seven years ago.” But even so, he acknowledges that companies are “very focused on using data to improve their own businesses,” perhaps taking “an internal look at the use of data rather than the external view that Journera represents. The opportunity is still there, and perhaps it’ll be sought after.”

Still, an aspect of financial engineering, different from what had brought Wayblazer down, may challenge a travel startup with a similar solution.

“Analytics and magical customer experiences are still out there for companies and innovators to take advantage of,” Katz said. “But if you talk to the venture capital community, they just don’t trust travel. If you go in and pitch a little win, they’re not interested. If you go in and say, ‘We can be the next $50 billion travel company,’ they may join you in the risk.

“But when was the last one? Airbnb and Uber were the last really big ones. They’re tough to find, and they’re not obvious. There have been some big wins and a lot of disappointments.”

And when did he realize he was in the latter camp?

“I looked at our opportunity to get to profitability in a few months, and I had to conclude we’re not going to get there. I came to the conclusion that our journey’s finished. On this mission, we have to raise our own checkered flag. We can say white flag, but let’s say checkered flag.”

Win or lose, whenever a finish line is crossed, a race will be reviewed for circumstances that contributed to the outcome. Katz’s post-mortem of Journera yields an abundance of clues.