Travel in a post-COVID world is likely going to be very different than from what it was before. The requirements for negative tests, vaccines and quarantines will be added to the already extensive list of regular visas and shots required to enter a lot of countries.
That's where Sherpa, a Canadian company and a global provider of travel identification requirements for the travel industry is fast becoming a big asset to the industry.
Last week, news Expedia.com launched a "COVID-19 Travel Advisor" online tool, powered by Sherpa, that provides information about current travel restrictions to potential and existing customers across seven of the company's brands.
A pilot phase of COVID-19 Travel Advisor that began in late November attracted 1.6 million users, and in March alone Expedia Group registered 1.8 million visits to the tool across its brands, a 97% jump from February.
The company was founded in 2015 by two friends Max Tremaine and Ivan Sharko who worked in the tech industry and travelled a lot for work. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Sherpa partners with the world's leading travel providers in over 50 countries and is trusted by brands such as Direct Travel, American Airlines, Expedia, TripActions, Icelandair, LATAM, Flynas and CWT.
"We had probably every visa experience in the book," explains Tremaine in an interview with TravelPulse Canada last week. "We had wrong visas, no visas, overstaying a visa, being turned back at the border - you name it. It made us wonder why is no one solving this visa access problem?"
"We thought to build a thing people keep on their phone would be tough, and we couldn't find what we needed just Googling things, there was almost a sketchy feel to it. We thought if we could build something that enables an airline for example, to build all the visa information and applications into their product that would be best."
The company was growing, and had clients that included Iceland Air, Condor, Thomas Cook, G Adventures, kiwi.com and a variety of OTAs.
And then the pandemic hit.
Rather than focus solely on visa requirements, Sherpa morphed to also become an aggregate of COVID travel information. The company now provides the most up to date information on every country's COVID travel requirements from testing, quarantines and as the world reopens, likely will include information on required vaccine passports.
"We were proving the product worked, we had lots of travel companies who liked our product. We are often the very first source to highlight changes in policies because we look at so much information. We use signals from literally millions of data points.
We already had that infrastructure in place and during COVID, it just became so much bigger."
Tremaine says the company's mission hasn't changed - it's always been about making it easier to cross borders, but that the problem has become much more complex and acute with COVID.
Sherpa is free for agents and consumers to use though travel companies such as airlines and tour operators pay for a more integrated approach to their listings. Tremaine sees the online tool as a useful tool for agents and says the company offers a 25% spilt on service fees, and also enables agents to control their pricing.
"For us to be able to add a visa application into a travel package is going to be really key post-COVID travel. We all need to make travel more seamless, we're not going to have the same leeway we used to."
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