Nearly 3% of online travel startups shut down in 2024, almost double the failure rate of other tech segments. Most of the travel and hospitality app development mistakes behind that number weren't really about a bad idea.
They were decisions made in the first few weeks of the build. How much the MVP tried to do on day one. Whether the team had budgeted for someone else's booking system. How much friction was still sitting in the checkout flow at launch.
A 2024 review of failed online travel companies found that 71% of the 38 that shut down that year had never raised beyond early-stage funding. Undercapitalized teams rarely get a second attempt once the first one burns its runway on features nobody had asked for yet.
Where travel and hospitality app development mistakes usually start
The instinct on a first travel app is to build a bit of everything at once: planning, booking, loyalty, maybe a social layer, because a competitor already has all of it. That instinct is what turns a scoped MVP into a year-long build with no revenue to show for it.
The flight-gifting app Skyhour ran from 2016 to 2024, built partnerships with more than 350 airlines, and had backing from JetBlue Ventures. It closed anyway, because it never solved a problem a gift card didn't already solve. A long feature list doesn't fix a thin reason to exist.
A team that ships a genuinely scoped MVP can usually tell the difference between a real gap and a nice-to-have faster than one still perfecting a roadmap.
The booking plumbing nobody budgets for
Travel apps look like ordinary software until they have to book something real. The moment a screen needs live inventory from a hotel chain or an airline, it's depending on somebody else's system.
That system gets tested and certified on somebody else's schedule, not the sprint plan drawn up before the contract was signed.
That's the part of the build that reliably runs over budget and past the launch date, because it's the one piece a demo can fake and a live booking can't.
Piling an AI concierge on top doesn't rescue a weak plan either. If every competitor can ship the same assistant in a quarter, it was never the reason someone would switch apps.
The advantage usually sits further back, in automating the operational side of a booking flow a guest never sees, not in a chat window bolted onto the front of it.
Losing the booking at the last screen
Photo by Sammy-Sander on Pixabay
Getting someone to the checkout screen and then losing them there is the most expensive version of this mistake. It happens after the marketing spend already worked.
Paysafe puts the average booking abandonment rate for online travel agents at nearly 94%, citing research that ties most of it to payment friction rather than price.
The same piece names a few specific culprits:
- Local payment methods that aren't supported in the traveler's country
- 3D Secure checks that throw false declines, especially on mobile
- Currency conversion or fee surprises that only show up on the final screen
None of those are hard to fix once you know to look for them. But they're invisible in a demo that only ever gets tested with one card, in one currency, on a desktop browser.
A checkout flow that's actually been tested against a second currency and a declined card catches this before launch, not after the reviews start naming it.
Pair that with payment integrations built for the mix of cards and wallets travelers actually use, and it's usually the cheapest of these three mistakes to fix, as long as you fix it before the app ships rather than after.
Cover photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels
