How Travefy Is Transforming Travel Agency Tech

Host: Mark Murphy  |  Guest: David Chait, Founder of Travefy  

In this episode, TravelTube.com founder Mark Murphy sits down with David Chait, the founder of Travefy (Travefy.com) — an all-in-one business platform built specifically for travel advisors and agencies. With over 40,000 subscribers now on its platform and three consecutive years on the Inc. 5000, Travefy has grown from a simple itinerary builder into a comprehensive operating system for travel professionals.

Topics covered:

•  The origin story of Travefy — from a travel planning tool among friends to a platform serving 40,000+ agencies

•  Why Travefy chose to build everything in-house rather than acquire third-party tools

•  How its all-in-one model (CRM, proposals, itineraries, payments, back office) eliminates 10+ separate subscriptions

•  AI-powered commission reconciliation that turns 190+ hours of manual work into seconds

•  Key partnerships with Travel Leaders Network, Virtuoso, Signature, and Ensemble

•  Marketing and website tools to help home-based agents build their client base

•  How to get started with a free trial and Travefy Academy training

🔗  Useful Links

Travefy: https://www.Travefy.com

TravelTube.com Newsletter: https://www.traveltube.com

Free Trial: Visit Travefy.com and click Get Started

Travefy Academy: Available inside the Travefy platform

Note: Transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

MARK MURPHY

Hi, it's Mark Murphy with TravelTube.com. This week I have a supplier that many of you travel agents use — but a lot of you still don't. It's known as Travefy at Travefy.com.

MARK MURPHY

I have a little inside perspective here — way back when I owned Travel Alliance Media, which included TravelPulse.com, Agent Studio, and a whole bunch of other products, I connected with David Chait, the founder of Travefy.com. We actually integrated his solution into a website builder at the time.

MARK MURPHY

Fast forward to today, and I am amazed at the transformation of this company. I'm bringing David to the stage to share some of the latest insights and innovations that he's come up with — which, to me, are must-haves for every travel agency owner out there.

MARK MURPHY

Before I bring David up, remember — I do this to support travel agents. So if you're a travel agent or travel advisor, whatever you want to call yourself: follow TravelTube.com by opting into our newsletter, follow us on your favorite podcast app, follow us on all the podcast apps, and follow us on all the social media platforms. Support those who support you — or get out of town with no transportation! Alright, enough of that. David, come on up!

DAVID CHAIT

Hey, Mark. Good to see you!

MARK MURPHY

Great. Well, first let me say congratulations on your success. I know when you started this business — and I know what it takes to build one, especially in a space where travel agents are watching every dollar. You're now up to what... 30,000 brands on the platform?

DAVID CHAIT

Over 40,000.

MARK MURPHY

Over 40,000! Congratulations. So tell me — just very briefly — the history of Travefy. It started with an itinerary builder, if I'm correct, and you've added a lot since then.

DAVID CHAIT

Yeah, the journey — and you know this from your own entrepreneurial experience — is really about learning and listening to your users. The original Travefy story started back when I was in business school, building software for needs I was personally having at that time in my life. A lot of traveling with friends, and my wife and I were engaged — bachelor and bachelorette parties. We built collaboration tools just to help us with our own travel. We put it out to the market with no real dollars behind it, just to learn.

DAVID CHAIT

What we found was this really heavy travel advisor segment leveraging these tools to help drive their communication needs. As you know, so much of the industry had been left behind from a technology standpoint. We saw great adoption and so many unmet needs. The more I dug into the industry, the more I fell in love with it. It's built on the backs of small businesses and solopreneurs — people that are building dreams around vacations and travel, one step at a time. Finding a way to support those businesses is rocket fuel and inspiring.

DAVID CHAIT

So we started absolutely on that itinerary and trip delivery side. Based on user needs and industry trends, we grew to include everything from world-class client experiences — itineraries, proposals, document delivery — to robust client and contact management, CRM, payments, and more, all the way to full back office, including commission reconciliation and beyond. We love helping these businesses grow, whether you're an agency of one or an agency of 10,000.

MARK MURPHY

I love entrepreneurs because you take the risk. In your case, you started to solve a problem — which is the best way. When I started my company, the first thing we came up with didn't work, so we pivoted. My insight was that print weeklies were delivering news a week or sometimes 10 days late, and they were restricting what they put on their websites. I didn't know how I was going to make money — I just wanted to solve the problem. So we created TravelPulse, and before long it became the largest travel news site in the world. That led to all the other product launches.

MARK MURPHY

Here's the key question. Once you've got an agent using the itinerary planner for Travefy, they might go to some third party for CRM. Why is it important to bring all those things together — beyond just the inconvenience of logging into a separate system?

DAVID CHAIT

That's the perfect question. Everything we develop, we think about in two distinct ways. First: is it in itself a 10x better tool? Whether that's the CRM, payments, PCI-compliant credit card authorizations, or website and marketing tools. But even with that standard, the secret sauce comes from the interconnectivity of your data and the incredible flows that emerge from having it all on one operating platform.

DAVID CHAIT

We can unlock insights for you, ensure quality and continuity of your data, and ultimately translate that into risk mitigation — but more than anything, incredible efficiency. At the end of the day, when you're a small business or a solopreneur, your biggest barrier to growth is the 24 hours in a day. Anything we can do to give you back time is how you grow and scale.

MARK MURPHY

Are people buying these components individually or as a single solution?

DAVID CHAIT

We don't sell modules individually — we give you access to everything. That comes from years of working with advisors. We don't want to wall things off, because we want you to unlock all of the magic. You get full access to everything with just one single license.

MARK MURPHY

One of the things I wanted to ask about is your partnership with Travel Leaders Network — the largest agency consortium out there. For folks who don't know, a consortium is basically where agencies band together under an umbrella to negotiate special deals with suppliers and technology partners like Travefy. How important are those relationships to your growth?

DAVID CHAIT

We have the privilege of working with all of the major consortia — Travel Leaders, Virtuoso, Signature, Ensemble. Our team was literally crisscrossing the country this week for their events. It's important in a couple of ways. Yes, it gives you reach to more incredible advisors and agencies. But for me, where the real magic comes from is what we can actually build through these partnerships.

DAVID CHAIT

We can do deep integrations with the required reporting that member agencies need. Whether it's marketing programs or compliance reporting — through our APIs and integrations with these consortia, like one just announced with TLN at the Edge conference — we can make all of that happen automatically. Rather than manual processes, it just flows. That's actually one of the most pivotal benefits we get from these partnerships. And yes, it builds a moat around the product — but more than anything, it helps those agencies and solopreneurs grow their businesses.

MARK MURPHY

I found it interesting when doing what I did that the industry is so fragmented. Sometimes you have large host agencies sticking with a really bad third-party product even when there's a better solution — whether it's the margin they're getting from a less robust product, or loyalty, or inertia. I'll give you one example. The head of a host agency once told me, 'This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen' — and then in the same breath said she couldn't switch because she'd been with her current vendor for 10 years and was on their board. How do you deal with that?

DAVID CHAIT

I think of it in a couple of ways. For us, it's not even purely a quality question. There are many solutions optimized purely on price point — and that is a real market position. Others are optimized for depth of platform and the outcomes you get from those integrations. For us, it comes down to having the intestinal fortitude to know where we sit in the market. We're comfortable knowing that's not going to be right for everyone. That's okay.

DAVID CHAIT

The second piece — when someone has been with a vendor for a long time, a lot of that comes down to data migration. It becomes a really important question. So we've invested very significantly in tools that make the transition to Travefy seamless: robust APIs, AI-driven imports, and our world-class client experience team. There's never friction around data mobility. And philosophically — this has nothing to do with just bringing people in — I believe that as an agency or advisor, having your data flow freely is essential. It's why we integrate with everybody and why we make it easy to leave too, as rare as that is.

MARK MURPHY

Now you mentioned AI — the biggest buzzword these days. Everyone is saying AI, AI, AI. Explain how AI actually works inside Travefy when it gets in the hands of agents.

DAVID CHAIT

Super important topic. And I'd say AI is now table stakes for your business. It's not something to be afraid of — it's something that can help you unlock efficiencies and time savings. And if you're not doing it, everyone else is, so you're already behind.

DAVID CHAIT

For us, how we implement AI is something we've really paused on to be as thoughtful as possible. A lot of implementations out there are just putting a ChatGPT-style chat box into a system — that's just removing a click. That's not it. For us, it's about identifying where the real bottlenecks and time sinks are, and solving specifically for those.

DAVID CHAIT

Prime example: commission reconciliation in the mid and back office. There is nothing more important than how an advisor or agency gets paid. With all of those supplier statements coming in, that process is incredibly time intensive and has a lot of surface area for human error. We built a smart AI-driven import and reconciliation process where you simply upload those supplier statements, and we do all the automation — reading, matching, pairing, reconciling — for you to review and validate. We've taken a process that was over 190 hours a year and literally made it take seconds. That's the example of how AI can be truly explosive for an agency.

MARK MURPHY

On the reconciliation side — one of the long-standing frustrations in this industry is when an independent agent books through a host agency, they have to manually enter that booking to get in the queue to be paid, then follow up repeatedly to get their commission split. How does Travefy fix that flow?

DAVID CHAIT

On the front end, getting bookings in is part of the secret sauce too. If you think about something on a proposal, something on an itinerary, something that becomes an invoice and then ultimately tracks a commission — we have that entire booking object mapped throughout so it flows automatically. An advisor can leverage standardized integrations, true APIs, or a smart AI-driven import to get information in, and it flows all the way through. Commission splits, markups — all of that is happening automatically. You can convert an event on an itinerary to an invoice to a tracked commission, and the splits are already saved. You can of course override for anything unique to that booking.

MARK MURPHY

If I'm a new agent and I want to get started — where do I go?

DAVID CHAIT

Number one, just go to our website — you can start a free trial immediately. We also have really robust training options: one-on-one sessions and our self-guided Travefy Academy. Our whole philosophy is 'meet you where you are.' Our team is there to help every step of the way. No matter where you are in your journey, we're here to help you grow — whether you're brand new and building your first book of business, or you're an established agency looking to scale.

MARK MURPHY

I know you've also got a great YouTube channel with tons of walkthroughs. What kind of activity do you see there — is it just people stumbling in and getting curious?

DAVID CHAIT

Beyond pure education, we make sure to run content that helps you learn how to build and grow your business. Inside the platform itself, we have a website and landing page builder that can help you set up that digital shingle — marketing pages that are fully socially graphed and optimized for sharing across networks. We have lead capture forms, and email marketing coming soon. And through Travefy Academy, we're not just teaching the software — we're teaching sales skills, outreach skills, and best practices. That's really where it becomes a full partnership.

MARK MURPHY

What are the biggest objections you hear from a travel agent checking you out for the first time? Too expensive? Too complex? Can't figure it out?

DAVID CHAIT

The biggest one is: 'I need to wait until I have the time to invest.' Whether someone is just getting started and busy building their business, or they're more established and overwhelmed day-to-day — I get it. But my advice is this: it is really hard to hit pause. But there is nothing greater you can do for your business than investing in the right tools. The compounding you get from that is incredible.

DAVID CHAIT

Start somewhere. What's one process where you're spending time you shouldn't be? Jump into Travefy and automate that one thing. You've just unlocked time. Then keep escalating from there.

MARK MURPHY

Since you package up everything — CRM, back office, proposals, marketing, payments — what would an agent have to buy individually to match what you offer? How many different companies would they be dealing with?

DAVID CHAIT

Easily 10 different logins, 10 different subscriptions. From a time and cost standpoint, it's an absolute no-brainer. But we also provide that flexibility for your existing stack — we integrate with everything. No two agencies are alike, so we want to give you freedom of choice while also giving you all the tools you need to run your business.

MARK MURPHY

Last question: all of these tools were built from the ground up. Why didn't you go out and acquire third parties or license software? Did you feel they couldn't meet the standard even with modifications?

DAVID CHAIT

Exactly. There are a lot of shortcuts you can take — licensing someone else's software, M&A activity. But ultimately, the standard we hold ourselves to — that seamless flow of data, those efficiencies that agencies and advisors can unlock — you'd spend all your time retrofitting a third-party product to make it okay. For us, the question is: can we build this better? If we can't, we don't do it. If we can, we build it from the ground up so that it's optimized for the way agencies operate, the way advisors operate, and the way data needs to flow to give you all that value.

DAVID CHAIT

That's a compass that has served us very, very well.

MARK MURPHY

Well, you've done exceptionally well. Inc. 5000 three years in a row — one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the United States. I had my own run on that list, so I know what it takes. I commend you on your success. Travel advisors — 14 years in business, and Travefy is not going anywhere. In my opinion, you've got the best solution out there, and everything you've added has been remarkable. Job well done. Congratulations, and thank you so much for sharing all this on TravelTube.com.

DAVID CHAIT

Awesome. Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it.

MARK MURPHY

Take care, David! Alright — that's David Chait from Travefy.com. They are absolutely knocking it out of the park. If you haven't checked them out yet, please visit Travefy.com — T-R-A-V-E-F-Y dot com. I speak from experience — we integrated their technology around 12 to 13 years ago, when they were in their infancy. The growth has been remarkable. That's what being an entrepreneur is all about: meeting a need and delivering on the solution. Check them out if you haven't already. If you haven't, you're wasting time and money. Appreciate you — thanks for joining me today.

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