TravelTech’s Hong Kong to London Hackathon To Be Sponsored By Travelport
Langley, U.K., 2017-May-07 — /Travel PR News/ — Travelport (NYSE: TVPT), today announced its sponsorship and involvement of the unique Hack Horizon hackathon which will give 32 participants exclusive access to its technology whilst on a flight from Hong Kong to London.
Flying at 40,000 feet, 32 of the best entrepreneurs, developers, engineers and technology designers will take to the skies on May 6th and immerse themselves in the travel technology and experience while travelling at 500 miles per hour. Participants have only three days and one flight from Hong Kong to London to build new products that can make travel simpler, safer, cheaper and way more fun.
Featuring Travelport’s unique mobile-optimized API, Travelport Trip Services, developers will quickly and efficiently perform mobile-optimized lowest-fare search against Travelport’s unrivalled content from the world’s leading network airlines. Further enhancing traveler choice for the ever-connected traveler, by delivering the right content to the right person at the right time.
Supporting the hackathon is just one of the ways that Travelport works with developers to stay on the cutting edge of innovation and redefine travel commerce by creating the next generation of experiences that modern travelers now expect. During the Travelport-sponsored hackathon, members of Travelport Labs will join the mentoring slots during the BA flight to London and Phil Donathy, Vice President of Product Management at Travelport will be on the judging panel for the pitching and award ceremony.
Hack Horizon’s co-founder, Kostadin Kolev, said: “We’ve embarked on a unique and ambitious project but we are delighted that so many leading players in the travel industry are supporting us. Through the hackathon our aim is to support the growth of new and innovative TravelTech products to ultimately improve the end-to-end customer experience in international travel. Asia has moved beyond imitating the West and has developed into a home of world-class talent, innovation and start-ups. Hack Horizon will not only help secure Hong Kong’s position as the region’s leading technology hub but also help break down potential silos in the ecosystem.”
Matt Minetola, Executive Vice President, Global Chief Information Officer at Travelport commented: “We are excited to be working with Hack Horizon participants to build something amazing together. Through our technological innovations and content leadership, we are continually redefining the way our customers buy and sell travel and Trip Services is our first mobile-optimized API. Focused first on lowest-fare air search Trip Services offers developers a fast and lean development experience to efficiently perform a lowest-fare search against Travelport provider content.”
Hack Horizon will take place from May 5th – 8th 2017 and photographs from the event will be available.
About Hack Horizon:
Hack Horizon is the brainchild of four globe-trotting and entrepreneurial millennials based in London and Hong Kong. They connected because of their belief in the power of technology and its ability to change and radically improve traditional industries. Having organised and participated in over 40 hackathons around the world between them, they wanted to take the hackathon model and apply it to the travel industry in a way that could have a long lasting, positive impact.
The team joined forces at the start of 2016 to galvanize the Asia-Pacific startup ecosystem and bring together industry innovators that had the ability to re-think and improve the travel experience for millions of people.
The first Hack Horizon will take place from 5th May – 8th May on a journey between Hong Kong and London. The hackathon will take place in numerous locations and on various modes of transport. The project is supported by leaders in the travel and transport arena including British Airways, London Heathrow Airport, Hong Kong International Airport, MTR, Transport for London, SITA, Travel Weekly Magazine, HKUST, Fresco Capital and Design Thinking Asia.
For more information and to apply go to: http://www.hackhorizon.com/
* What is a hackathon?
The word hackathon is a portmanteau of the words hack and marathon, where hack is used in the sense of playful, exploratory programming. A hackathon is an intense and collaborative event where computer programmers, designers, engineers, and product managers come together to rapidly design and build new Minimum Viable Products using software.
About Travelport
Travelport is a Travel Commerce Platform providing distribution, technology, payment, mobile and other solutions for the global travel and tourism industry. With a presence in approximately 180 countries, approximately 4,000 employees, and an additional approximately 1,000 employees at IGT Solutions Private Ltd who provide us with application development services, our 2016 net revenue was over $2.3 billion.
Travelport is comprised of:
- A Travel Commerce Platform through which it facilitates travel commerce by connecting the world’s leading travel providers with online and offline travel buyers in a proprietary business-to-business (B2B) travel marketplace. Travelport has a leadership position in airline merchandising, hotel content and rate distribution, mobile travel commerce and a pioneering B2B payment solution that addresses the needs of travel intermediaries to efficiently and securely settle travel transactions.
- Technology Services through which it provides critical IT services to airlines, such as shopping, ticketing, departure control and other solutions, enabling them to focus on their core business competencies and reduce costs.
Travelport is headquartered in Langley, U.K. The Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and trades under the symbol “TVPT”.
SOURCE: Travelport
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Chris Boba
Corporate Communications Manager
Tel: +44 (0) 1753 288 691
Email: chris.boba@travelport.com
For Hack Horizon media enquiries, please contact:
Zoe Belhomme
PR Manager, Hack Horizon
Tel +852 5446 8140
Email: zoe@hackhorizon.com
Web: www.hackhorizon.co