Booking a trip should feel like the start of the vacation. For most people, it feels like homework.
That’s why Loes Daniels and Jorik Schröder, the founders of Experiencegift, launched Away.ai: an AI travel platform that turns a conversation into a booked trip, flight and hotel included, in a matter of minutes.
Born from a simple observation - that booking a trip has become work - Away.ai is a brand-new venture. While its founders bring years of travel industry experience, the platform itself is entirely fresh.
What a decade in travel teaches you
Loes and Jorik started Experiencegift in 2013 with a simple observation: travel is the thing people most want to give and receive, and it was almost impossible to give properly. That turned into Hotelgift, Flightgift, Traingift and Activitygift, and into gift cards redeemed by travelers in more than 100 countries.
Those brands made gifting travel effortless, but didn’t solve the challenges posed by planning a trip.The phase where someone has a budget, a rough idea, two weeks off in May, but no clear way to turn all of that into a booking.
That is the problem Away.ai is built to solve, and it is why the founders chose to build it as a separate company rather than a feature inside an existing brand. Years of building Experiencegift gave them a close read on what travelers ask for, what they actually book, and where they get stuck.
The harsh reality: the hardest part of a trip is booking it
Anyone who has planned a vacation knows the pattern. You open one site, then another. You find a flight that works but the hotel near it is fully booked. You find the hotel, go back, and the flight price has moved. Twenty tabs later you book something, and you still are not sure it was the right call.
The travel industry has spent twenty years getting very good at showing people more options. Search results, filters, sorting, price alerts, maps.
The assumption was that more choice equals a better outcome.
In practice, more choice mostly produces fatigue and second-guessing.
"Booking travel today is more tiring than the trip itself. Twenty-seven tabs open, hundreds of options, and after hours of searching you are still not sure you made the right choice," says Loes Daniels, founder and CEO of Away.ai. "The modern traveller does not want more choice. They want the right choice. Away.ai understands what suits you, selects the best options at the best value for money, and books the trip within minutes. With us, your vacation starts the moment you book."
What Away.ai is
Away.ai is a conversational travel platform.
Instead of filling in search fields, you describe the trip you want in your own words, roughly the way you would text a friend: somewhere warm in late October, under a thousand euros, direct flight if possible, a hotel with a pool and a decent breakfast.
The platform reads that, and instead of returning three hundred results, it returns a handful of complete trips: flight and hotel together, priced, bookable.
You pick one. It books it.
The tagline on the site is "your trip, one chat away", and that is a fair description of the product. The work happens behind the conversation.
How it works
Underneath the chat sits a proprietary matching algorithm that translates preferences, travel party, timing and budget into a shortlist of carefully selected options, optimized for value for money rather than for the lowest headline price.
"Behind a single conversation sits a system that searches real-time prices, availability and quality data across thousands of flights and hotels," says Jorik Schröder, co-founder of Away.ai. "Our algorithm translates preferences into a handful of options that genuinely fit, instead of hundreds of search results. Everything we have learned about travelers since 2013 is built into that system."
Because the platform optimizes for fit rather than for what you typed into a search box, it regularly surfaces destinations people would never have found themselves but that match exactly what they asked for.
Ask for warm, quiet, good food, short flight, and you may not get the city you had in mind.
You may get a better one.
Away.ai is IATA-certified and affiliated with SGR, the Dutch travel guarantee scheme, with customer service available 24 hours a day.
Travel credit on every booking
Away.ai rewards you for loyalty. Every booking adds credit to a personal Away Wallet: 2% back on every trip, rising to 4% when the booking is paid entirely from the Wallet.
The credit is spendable immediately on a next trip. No expiring points, no tier system, no small print.
This reflects a core belief of the founders: value that belongs to the traveler should stay available until they are ready to use it.
Experiencegift cards don’t have an expiry date, and Away Wallet credit works on the same principle. You earn it, it stays in your account, and you spend it whenever you decide to book your next trip.
Starting in the Netherlands, built to go further
Away.ai is live now for travellers in the Netherlands, and the plan is to expand quickly across Europe and beyond.
The team already spans across Amsterdam, London, New York, Athens and Dubai, and the platform was architected from day one for international scale.
If you are outside the Netherlands, it is worth keeping an eye on.
If you are in the Netherlands, it is worth trying now.
Sign up, describe the trip you have been putting off planning, and see what comes back.
We are extremely proud of this launch. New company, new product, same people who have spent more than a decade making travel easier to give - and now easier to book.
Away.ai is an independent company founded by Loes Daniels and Jorik Schröder. It is not part of Experiencegift B.V.