Travel Investor Day is an initiative promoted by the Tourism Start-up Association that brings together innovative start-ups and SMEs in the tourism and culture sectors with investors, venture capitalists and industry operators. The call for participation in this year’s edition is open until 31 March 2026, and the event will take place at Milano SmartCityLab on 14 May 2026. On that occasion, the selected companies will have the opportunity to present their projects to an audience of investors and operators in the innovation ecosystem.
Travel Investor Day was created to bring together start-ups and investors in one of the largest but least funded sectors of innovation. Despite the global economic weight of tourism, travel start-ups account for only about 1% of global venture capital and about 0.75% in the early stages, the association explains in a statement. This gap makes it even more important to create concrete opportunities for entrepreneurship and capital to meet.
The call is aimed at innovative start-ups and SMEs operating in the tourism, hospitality and experiences sectors, with a round of fundraising underway or in preparation. The selected companies will be evaluated by a jury of experts from the start-up ecosystem and the travel sector on the basis of criteria such as business model scalability, team quality, degree of innovation and market potential.
The selected start-ups will be supported in preparing for their pitch, with work dedicated to structuring their presentation and preparing for the meeting with investors during the final event.
“Tourism is one of the country’s main economic drivers, but start-ups in the sector still struggle to access investment, especially in the early stages of development,” comments Giulia Trombin, president of the Tourism Start-up Association, in a statement. “With Travel Investor Day, we want to help bridge this gap by creating concrete opportunities for innovation and capital to meet and giving start-ups the chance to present their projects to investors and companies in the sector. In Italy, investments are often made when companies are already established, while one of the main gaps concerns the initial stages, from pre-seed to seed: the moment when startups are validating their product, beginning to collect their first metrics and needing resources to strengthen their business model and prepare for subsequent rounds.”
“Our role is to create targeted connections between start-ups and investors: we bring early-stage companies to seed investors and scale-ups to venture capitalists, ensuring that every meeting has real potential,” explains Karin Venneri, vice-president of the Tourism Start-up Association. . “Travel Investor Day was not created as a recurring event, but as something we activate when we see that there are startups on the market that deserve attention and investors interested in the sector. Our role is precisely this: to ensure quality in the deal flow and facilitate meetings that can really generate investment.”
The first edition of Travel Investor Day, organised in 2022, attracted almost 100 applications from tourism and culture start-ups, from which 12 innovative companies were selected to present their pitches to investors and operators in the innovation ecosystem. One of the concrete results of the initiative was the conclusion of an investment deal for the start-up Freedome, an Italian platform dedicated to booking outdoor experiences.
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