When Anil Kumar Prasanna looked at the travel ecosystem in 2023, he saw a strange imbalance. Flights and hotels had become almost fully digital, powered by global distribution systems and channel managers, while the most emotional part of a trip, the experiences people remember long after the boarding pass is discarded, remained stubbornly offline.
“Over 85 percent of the global experiences market remained offline and fragmented while flights and hotels achieved near total online penetration,” he recalls. Travelers still shuffled between multiple apps, local agents and last-minute recommendations, and experience providers struggled with visibility and digital tools. GoodPass was born in that gap, with a simple vision to make experiences as easy to book as a flight or a hotel.
The scale of the opportunity is not small. “The experiences market is a $250-billion global opportunity projected to grow faster than flights or hotels,” Prasanna says. Yet the segment has remained underdigitised because it is deeply local, fragmented and lacks global infrastructure. “The experiences segment remains underdigitised because it is highly fragmented, locally operated, and lacks global booking infrastructure,” he explains. Unlike hotels or airlines, there is no standardised system for real time pricing and availability across thousands of operators. That, he argues, makes experiences the last major travel vertical still waiting to be fully digitised.
GoodPass wants to be the infrastructure that changes that. Prasanna describes the company as “the transaction layer of AI-powered travel” and insists it is not just a slogan. “Calling GoodPass the transaction layer of AI powered travel means we make AI travel planning actually bookable,” he says. For a traveller, that translates into something simple. When someone asks an AI assistant for “three days in Bali with waterfall hikes and local food,” GoodPass sits behind that conversation, using its stack to interpret intent, match it with curated inventory, pull live prices and complete the booking without leaving the interface. “For travelers, it means when they ask an AI like ChatGPT or Claude to plan a trip, they can instantly book tours, activities, or experiences without leaving the conversation,” he says. For partners such as fintechs, airlines and online travel brands, GoodPass becomes a plug and play engine that turns discovery into transactions, with Prasanna summarising it as “the plug and play engine that turns travel discovery into real transactions, driving revenue, engagement, and new customer value.”
The key to that vision is the Model Context Protocol, the emerging standard that allows AI models to talk directly to tools and real-world systems. “The Model Context Protocol is what makes prompt commerce possible,” he says. “Instead of an AI just suggesting links, MCP lets the AI fetch live inventory, prices, and availability, and then trigger an actual booking within the conversation.” In his words, “MCP turns AI from a travel assistant into a transaction engine,” making it possible to move from suggestion to confirmation entirely inside a chat window.
Building that engine, however, meant solving a problem far more complex than hotel nights or airline seats. The toughest challenge, Prasanna says, was slot level inventory fragmentation at scale. “A hotel room has 365 inventory points per year, one per night. An airline seat has maybe four to six departure times per route daily. But a single experience product might have 12 time slots per day, each with independent pricing, capacity, and availability rules. That is 4,380 inventory points per year per product,” he explains. Multiply that across thousands of experiences, add dynamic pricing that changes by date and quantity, layered with currency conversion and strict time zone-based cutoffs, and the system still has to respond in under 500 milliseconds if it wants to power conversational bookings.
“Traditional travel systems are not built for this,” he says. Hotels can cache nightly rates and airlines have stable schedules. Experiences require real time, slot level precision or platforms risk selling slots that do not exist. GoodPass responded with what he describes as a pre computation plus real time validation architecture. “We created intelligent calendar pre generation that computes availability for every slot, option and ticket combination, then combined it with a time zone aware cutoff engine and runtime dynamic pricing,” he explains. On top of that sits capacity tracking across thousands of slots per product to prevent overbooking while showing the maximum bookable quantity in real time. “The result is sub-second availability queries across 10,000 plus experiences with slot level precision, enabling AI to book complex tours as easily as ChatGPT answers questions,” he says.
GoodPass has crossed $300,000 in sales, driven largely by organic discovery and partnerships. “Our growth has been driven by authentic demand and product market fit, not paid marketing,” Prasanna says. Travellers find the platform through Google Search thanks to rich, curated inventory and optimised listings, while “GoodPass Originals,” unique experiences that are not available elsewhere, drive repeat and referral behaviour.
Strategic partnerships have quietly extended that reach. “Google Things to Do has amplified our global visibility by integrating GoodPass listings directly into Google Search and Maps,” he says. A partnership with Air India gives the company access to airline passengers with contextual, destination-based offers that can be tied to reward points and ancillary revenue. On the supply side, “OneTac, backed by Prashant Prakash of Accel Partners, strengthens our supply side integration, giving us first mover access to verified local operators and real time inventory,” he notes. Together, he believes, these alliances position GoodPass “as the most connected and scalable experience marketplace in Asia, bridging both global demand and local supply.”
“GoodPass demonstrates how digital public infrastructure can amplify the experience economy, connecting local creators, destinations, and enterprises through a trusted, interoperable framework,” said Satish Shekar, Co-Author of OneTAC and Director, Culkey Foundation.
The revenue mix, for now, is anchored in transaction commissions. “Currently, our revenue primarily comes from transaction commissions, which average between 12 and 15 percent depending on the product category and partner model,” Prasanna says.
The company is simultaneously building out platform licensing and white label partnerships so that fintechs, airlines and superapps can use GoodPass as an embedded experiences layer. “Looking ahead, AI driven data monetization will become a key growth lever,” he adds, pointing to insights from travel intent, search behaviour and booking patterns that can fuel more personalised offers and smarter dynamic pricing for partners. “In short, we are evolving from a commission only model to a multi revenue ecosystem, combining transactions, technology licensing, and intelligent data value.”
GoodPass today runs on a lean eight-member team that includes the co-founders, focused on product development, supplier expansion and AI integration. With fresh capital, the company is targeting six to seven million dollars in annual GMV within the next eighteen months, powered by new destinations, deeper B2B integrations and the scaling of its AI powered booking infrastructure.
Prasanna is quick to draw a line between GoodPass and many AI travel startups that exist primarily as demos. “Unlike many AI travel startups still in prototype or concept phase, GoodPass is already live, transacting, and revenue generating,” he says. “We focus on execution over experimentation, building real supplier integrations, live pricing infrastructure, and scalable B2B partnerships rather than just conversational demos.”
That confidence is shaped by his previous journey. As the co-founder of AxisRooms, one of India’s early hotel distribution and channel management platforms, he saw first-hand how technology could transform fragmented supply into scalable commerce. “That experience taught us the importance of real time connectivity, lean operations, and global distribution partnerships,” he says. “With GoodPass, we are taking that same philosophy to the experiences vertical, building the missing infrastructure layer that connects local operators, fintechs, and AI ecosystems, this time with AI native scalability and global ambition from day one.”
The future he is building for is one where travellers do not sift through endless tabs and filters. “AI is transforming travel from search-based decisions to intent driven conversations,” he says. Instead of clicking through pages of options, people will simply say what they want, whether it is a three-day foodie trip in Kyoto or a family adventure in Bali, and AI will plan, personalise and book it instantly. “In that future, GoodPass becomes the transaction backbone, the layer that connects AI platforms like ChatGPT or Claude to real, bookable inventory worldwide,” Prasanna says. “We are building the infrastructure that powers AI led discovery and instant booking, ensuring every AI travel interaction ends not with a link, but with a confirmed experience.”
