JetBlue Airways’ investment arm is looking for innovators that are true travel industry trendsetters.
There may be a shortage of women in travel tech, but Christina Heggie, an investment principal at JetBlue Technology Ventures, is anything but short of experience.
“I first fell in love with the industry 14 years ago, while I was a barista in the Seattle area, and that was it,” says Heggie, who then ran a little B&B on Camano Island. Pursuing her degree in hospitality management from the Cornell Hotel School, she went from “wanting to run a hotel to wanting to run a hotel company”, a realisation that led her into the Switzerland headquarters of the hotel chain Mövenpick. What followed was a stint in general consulting for AT Kearney, in both New York and London, where she discovered that she really missed ‘her industry’.
“I knew I wanted to return to the travel industry, but the question was where did I want to go. Did I want to go old world, or new?”
To find out, Heggie first tested her traditional problem solving skills in the digital strategy department at Starwood, where she helped define their mobile app strategy. Then she moved to Airbnb’s hospitality group in San Francisco where she worked closely with Chip Conley who is “one of the greatest people in the industry”.
“At Airbnb, I fell in love with the energy in the Bay area,” she adds.
Before joining JetBlue Technology Ventures, the investment arm of the JetBlue Airways, Heggie also worked for travel tech startup Checkmate, until it was acquired by TrustYou in 2016. “The traditional travel industry can be risk adverse, but in the Bay Area, there’s a different mindset – to choose not do things the way we have always done them, but do things to make travel better,” she says.
Heggie believes what the industry needs is companies that “are truly going to change how consumers travel – into perpetuity”.
1. Voice will be the next big disruptor
Today hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars are poured into search advertising in some form or other. “Priceline and Expedia each outspend Starwood by three to one on ad dollars, but voice,” Heggie argues, “will fundamentally change where those dollars go.”
How exactly this plays out remains to be seen but voice will eventually narrow down the hundreds of search results delivered today to the five or so best one’s for an individual customer.
