Vionmo Wins the ‘Travel Startup Night’ With Mobility Data for Tourism

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Most of a vacation’s emissions are produced not at the hotel but on the way there: With precisely that issue, the Austrian start-up vionmo won the Travel Start-up Night Vienna 2026. Five young companies pitched their solutions for the tourism industry at the ÖBB Innovation Lab at Vienna’s main train station, and the audience chose vionmo as the winner. Second place went to touristinfo.ai from South Tyrol.

The win sends vionmo to the annual final in Germany, where it will compete for the title “Travel Start-up 2026.” The evening was organized by the Travel Industry Club Tourismus Austria (TICT) together with the Travel Industry Club Germany and the German Association for Internet Travel Sales (VIR), according to a press release.

The Five Start-Ups at a Glance

• vionmo: The start-up analyzes visitor and mobility data for destinations, leisure facilities and events and turns it into concrete measures, from shuttles to visitor management to targeted marketing.
• touristinfo.ai: The platform uses A.I. in destination management, informs guests digitally and helps steer visitor flows.
• Majourny: The start-up is developing an A.I.-powered digital employee meant to relieve hotel teams of internal processes and recurring tasks.
• Neural Natives: The company brings an A.I. concierge directly to WhatsApp, available to hotel guests around the clock.
• FemSupply: The start-up wants to make feminine hygiene products a natural part of the hotel experience.

Three of the five start-ups are betting on artificial intelligence, which has clearly arrived in tourism, from the concierge to the digital hotel employee.

Vionmo: Travel to the Destination as a Blind Spot

Vionmo was founded by its chief executive, Michael Jayasekara. The start-up helps tourism businesses, regions and event organizers put climate-friendly mobility into practice based on data, as Mr. Jayasekara explained in an interview with Trending Topics. His credo: Tourism and transportation belong together.

“For us, a topic also won that evening: getting there,” Mr. Jayasekara said after the win. “It often causes the largest share of a visit’s emissions and is effectively not measured in any structured way.” Together with its customers, vionmo wants to turn guest and mobility data into concrete offerings, such as on-demand shuttles for events, marketing based on where guests come from or more frequent bus service in the region.

Touristinfo.ai: The A.I. Guide From South Tyrol

The runner-up, touristinfo.ai, comes from Mediatize, a South Tyrolean start-up founded at the NOI Techpark in Bolzano by Julian Palmarin and Sebastian Betz. Its multilingual A.I. chatbot combines real-time data on traffic, parking, weather and events, according to Open Data Hub, and directs guests to public transportation or to less crowded attractions. It is used in San Vigilio di Marebbe, among other places.

From Pitch to Partnership

For the organizers, what matters most is what happens after the evening. “What is particularly important to us is that pitches like these lead not just to applause but to contacts, partnerships and concrete applications,” said Marco Riederer, president of TICT. Ronja Scherzinger of the start-up FashionTouri, which took third place at the 2025 final, described what that can look like.