Time to celebrate, we are now more than 50% funded!

I also wanted to take a moment to explain to you WHY I am so passionate about transforming the airport experience.

Over the past decade, I have traveled a lot. I’ve visited over 35 countries, lived in 4, and worked in 3. I’m always up for a new adventure. I even went to an MBA program that’s known for international business, and allows you to do a great deal of your coursework abroad (Thunderbird School of Global Management). During the past decade, there were certainly stretches of time where I felt that I was living that George Clooney “Up in the Air” life style, spending more time in airports and on the road than I actually did at home.

This got me thinking about finding ways to make the traveling life not only LESS BAD, but also make it BETTER! This led me to think of the idea of tripchi in 2012, and the concept of Airports 2.0—the age of the “destination” airport that people enjoy visiting, because it’s built around the customer experience, with Food & Beverage, and Retail concepts that reflect the local culture as well as global passenger taste. As airports are gradually evolving towards this concept, tripchi is building the technology to guide you on the journey to the new “experiential” airport. Here’s a glimpse of an Airport 2.0 from teammate Tim Szal:

Our team is passionate about 3 things – traveling, using technology to make life easier, and applying analytics to personalize our products. We’ve been working together for about a year on this company, and my co-founder and I also have another company together, which demonstrates the commitment the team has for one another. We are also extremely fortunate to have the co-founder of SkyMall on our Board, as well as the CEO of a software development company.

As for the name, this was 6 month brainstorming exercise that came to a head in the middle of Startup Weekend Orange Country 2011. We literally had hundreds of words in an excel spreadsheet and started playing the “name matching” game. One word we wanted to be descriptive and the second word therefore needed to be more evocative, conjuring up concrete emotions of the brand we wanted to build. The most obvious, and seemingly the best, domain names were taken. We were riffing on the whole “sumo”, “ninja”, “zen” theme that was popular with startups back in 2011, and the word ”chi” came to mind. The rest is history!

Thanks for all your support!