Forty-five young professionals and entrepreneurs recently took part in the second Hotusa Challenge, an innovation meeting run by Hotusa Ventures, the corporate capital fund run by the Barcelona-based hotel company Grupo Hotusa and Sonar Ventures, the first startup builder in Spain.
For over 48 hours at the Eurostars Madrid Tower 5*, the participants carried out intense sessions for team building and developing proposals and products that would provide solutions to the different problems affecting the travel and hospitality sector.
The best project from the proposals by the nine participating groups, according to the jury, was an augmented reality mobile app with stories based on cities. This means tourists visiting the cities could find out more about them in a unique and different way. Using the concept of gamification, the user has to visit the main attractions along the route, obtaining tourist information while finding treasure, discovering mysteries and solving puzzles.
The jury judged the projects according to originality, how they were developed, and their hypothetical viability in the real world. Other projects featured were an automatic messaging service that allows hotel guests to ask any questions they have regarding their stay autonomously, without calling reception; a platform that brings together people visiting a given destination at the same time; a platform that collects lost objects and allows hotels to return them to the owner in the event that they are claimed, or sell them on second-hand portals; and a service that picks up luggage at hotels and transfers them to the airport or station so that tourists can enjoy the last day of their holiday without having to return to the hotel to pick up their left luggage.
The Hotusa Challenge got started with training sessions organized by different mentors, in which group activities were carried out so that the participants could get to know each other better and make up different work teams. On the next day, the teams worked on developing solutions, designing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and validating the first project hypotheses, which were presented to the jury.
The participants of the Hotusa Challenge were carefully chosen from over 150 potential candidates on the basis of their skills and abilities, and they were placed in teams specializing in different areas: development, business, design and usability, digital marketing, travel and hospitality. During the three-day event, a team of 15 mentors with professional links to the fields of innovation, investment and entrepreneurship offered advice to the groups so they could shape their projects.