A metro area startup that provides a digitally enabled travel service received $2 million in pre-seed funding from investors both in Birmingham and around the country.
Nicer, which was founded in May 2023 by travel agent Ragan Stone, is an AI-enhanced mobile app that allows travelers and travel advisers to more efficiently connect and work closely when planning and organizing trips.
Stone, who also owns travel advising firm Ragan Stone Travel, started Nicer as a solution for some of the tedious work that goes into trip planning.
“We live in a world where people order coffee on their phones, buy groceries on their phones, can pretty much do anything they want through a digital process, and working with a travel adviser is extremely manual right now,” Stone said. “It started getting my wheels turning about, ‘What’s the future going to look like in two or three years? Are (my clients) still going to look up my email address and find me and reach out when it comes time for a new trip with all these ways to book travel?’”
Stone said most of Nicer’s investors from outside of Birmingham are executives at other travel agencies or involved in tech or venture capital. Stone plans to use the $2 million investment to continue developing the app and invest in more marketing.
Stone recently finalized a deal with Internova, an international travel service provider. Part of that deal ensures that any travel adviser who starts working for Internova will automatically be added to Nicer’s platform. Nicer currently has around 35 advisers using the platform to provide their services to clients, but Stone said her team is currently working on processing and adding around 60 to 75 more in the next 60 days.
Stone said many travel advisers use numerous different software or website platforms when helping clients plan trips, but Nicer integrates many of those platforms into one comprehensive space to boost efficient communication.
“It puts all of that into one place versus having these fragmented pieces that are kind of hard to organize,” Stone said. “This allows a really seamless communication through an app.”
Stone described the Nicer app as similar to a dating app, because it’s structured around travelers and travel advisers making personalized profiles that outline their skills and interests regarding travel and are then matched based on that information. Travelers can match with a different adviser for each trip based on specialities.
“It allows the advisers to sell what they know and what they’re good at, which is a better use of their time and allows the traveler to connect with the best experts in those areas,” Stone said. “Say you’re going to Costa Rica with your family – you'd use a different adviser than you may use if you’re going on a golf trip through Ireland, because advisers have different specialties.”
Stone and her team use AI to analyze travelers’ data, which allows advisers to better personalize trip itineraries for their clients. Hotel preferences, prior trip destinations and types of restaurants visited while traveling are some of the data that Nicer’s built-in AI analyzes for advisers to use when working with travelers.
Travelers who use Nicer can also log previous trips and add photos to their profile so that advisers can see what types of activities they like to do while they’re traveling. The amount of information travelers want to include in profiles is entirely up to them.
“What I was getting told a lot was, ‘Well, you can’t just put that into an app, it can’t be through tech,’ and we pretty much have,” Stone said. “If a dating app can result in thousands of marriages, who’s to say that a similar process for a service-oriented business that’s relationship-based like this can’t also have successful outcomes?”
Stone has already started having conversations for seed-stage funding with investors who have reached out and expressed interest.
“I don’t want to say that we feel rushed to go ahead and jump into it, but we definitely will open it up in the next 30 days or so, just because of the outreach we’ve had and because the environment for raising capital right now is not as generous as it was this time last year,” Stone said.
Stone is excited to continue growing Nicer to connect more advisers and travelers together, and said she is thankful for the community in Birmingham.
“Our goal in the end is to be less of the traditional travel agency as you know it and far more like a marketplace for the adviser and agent to connect,” she said. “What I’d really love for people to know is that Birmingham is really our home, and we have great advisers here, we have great talent here and Birmingham’s on the map for the travel world and travel industry.”
