Moscow’s vibrant travel tech scene: Interview with Nemo.Travel

Nemo.Travel, a Moscow based software company focused on e-travel technologies, recently celebrated its 10th birthday with the Travel Massive community in the Russian capital.

In this Q&A, Dmitry Novikov – an active member of Travel Massive Moscow and a CEO of Nemo.Travel, to tell us about the lessons learnt over the years and the development of the travel startup community in Moscow. 

Tell us more about Nemo.Travel? What travel challenges are you solving?

Nemo.Travel was founded back in 2008 and started as an Internet Booking Engine (IBE) provider for travel agencies. After that, we transformed ourselves into an IT provider and content aggregator for airlines and travel agencies.

Nemo.Travel provides e-commerce solutions and NDC services to airlines. We also provide the content of different carriers in one API and one GUI to travel agencies. Our main goal is to help companies sell their seats and services more effectively and for clients to buy those seats and services more effectively.

Nemo.Travel just turned 10. What were the greatest challenges you had to overcome?

It was a challenge to realize along the way that you can be wrong. We were wrong with some products and some hypotheses and we had to re-think and re-do what we were doing without stopping our everyday activities.

When you are multi-user platform, changing something is not easy. It is similar to when you try to repair your watch mechanism while it’s moving.

Another big challenge was to build a good team – and it seems to me that this is a never ending story. We are growing fast but at the same time we want to always work only with the best people that conform to our high standards. That’s hard sometimes.

If you had to give 3 tips to new startups in travel, what would they be from your experience?

Think different, be brave enough to stop and re-do, go deep into difficult things.

The new startups have to be different because this leads to innovation, and innovation is something that keeps this world moving.

There’re a lot of ”mono-cell’ startups but the market needs complex solutions. We believe the slots for easy and quick money are all full. As the market is changing so fast now, it is possible that by the time you launch, you will realize that what you created is for today, but different things will be needed tomorrow.

Startups shall always adhere to reality and be ready to re-do things if necessary.

The biggest strength that differentiates startups from big enterprises is the capability to be faster and more flexible than the giants.

The travel startup industry in Moscow is growing. What is the reason behind this success?

I think it is growing everywhere and it happens due to the fact that the whole industry is living in times of dramatic changes. Customers are changing, mobile is booming but as an example – we still have airline distribution models based onto technologies from the 1970s.

The combination of those factors generates perfect fertile soil for startups and brings ideal opportunities. The investor culture has also changed and it now helps a lot to startups to grow.

And at the end – Moscow has always been a city full of talents which want to make the world better.

What’s next for Nemo.Travel?

We’ve launched our online booking tool for business travel management and are happy to see that the results are even better than we could have expected. We still have a lot of work to do and we will keep on pushing, according to our initial plan.

At the same time, we’re investing in adding more content and going deep into the functional platform issues – we love to do things that are difficult to a majority of players. In the past, a lot of operations were exclusive to a human operator due to their complexity – now we want to automate that.

And, finally, we have become NDC Level 3 certified IT provider and we have a lot of things for 2019 within our NDC project.

Thanks, Dmitry for your insights!

Here are more photos from Nemo.Travel’s 10th birthday: 

Connect with Dmitry Novikov on Travel Massive and LinkedIn and join the Moscow chapter to get updates for future events.