When traveling to an unfamiliar or possibly dangerous destination, it’s always important to do plenty of research well in advance of your trip. But there’s only so much you can learn from looking at the State Department website or reading guidebooks. You won’t know all the details of what’s happening on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood scale, nor will you be able to let other travelers know when something sketchy is up.
Colorado-based startup Travel Recon seeks to fix that using a combination of official intelligence data and information submitted by travelers and community members.
Founder and CEO Toby Houchens was part of the U.S. Army as a Green Beret for more than 11 years. During that time, his experiences led him to create Travel Recon.
“I saw that even within the military, it was hard to get the right intelligence to the right place at the right time,” he said. “When you translate that to the private sector, it’s even worse.”
Houchens also experienced a use case for the product firsthand after two family members were kidnapped while they were on vacation.
“What was really compelling to me, what struck me, was that it was completely preventable,” he said. “If they’d known about that city, if they knew a little bit more about the airport and what was going on at that time, they would’ve been able to avoid that situation. The State Department website had just told them not to go; that doesn’t help business travelers who have to go, or just people who want to travel the world.”
In 2013, Houchens sought to create an informative platform that also provided actionable solutions instead of simple generalizations. It was important to him that the product would be localized to specific areas, dynamic and changing over time — just like the cities themselves.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘Mexico City has a high murder rate,’ and it’s another thing to say, ‘This particular neighborhood has had several murders over the past three months.’ Otherwise, you’re just scaring people.”
Travel Recon is a tech company in more respects than having built an app; the massive amounts of data they handle on a daily basis requires a sophisticated and critical approach to data processing, interpretation and distribution.
The company gets that data through a vast network of proprietary methods and strategic partners, which pull information from different sources, including the open, deep and dark webs. They also turn to social media and the community using their Go Recon app, a Waze-style network of users interested in reporting incidents or security threats.
“We believe that, across the spectrum of any intelligence operation, you need to have rare and explicit data, appropriate analysis and analytics and the right dissemination — it has to be in a format that’s actionable,” said Houchens. “Technology helps us so we can get more granular and relevant intelligence, but we can also do that at scale. We’re always going to need human analysts at some point, but right now, the industry has been very archaic in their approaches to travel risk management. Any effective travel risk management or duty of care needs to have decision-making capabilities or actionable steps at its core.”
With the most advanced version of the Travel Recon app, Travel Recon Pro, travelers can plan their trip by reading digestible, relevant, up-to-date intelligence reports. The reports cover transportation, lodging, threat overviews and emergency response plans. Users can even get a visual preview of the area with the app’s GIS with an intelligence overlay.
Customization is a key feature of the app. Travel Recon provides a personalized risk rating that’s updated regularly. Based on a user’s proximity to different threats, it’ll issue a risk rating and will update a user’s “connected groups” of friends and family. Users can turn on tracking and communication, even using the app to check-in in the event of an emergency. This level of personalization helps keep travelers safer than a blanket warning about a geographic area.
“A lot of the threats we’re facing today aren’t by nation states,” said Houchens. “They’re population-based, and they’re constantly changing.”
Thanks to the team’s hard work, the company is poised to have a massive 2017, with plans to scale the team and expand their presence along the Front Range, including possible operations centers in Colorado Springs or Denver. Houchens said that while increased customer demand is a good problem to have, keeping up with it is still a challenge that requires a highly-skilled team.
“One of our missions is to hire veterans. The opportunity is a perfect transition for them, because after they leave the military, Travel Recon is a way for them to use their skills and still keep doing something important,” he said.
After going through the Telluride Venture Accelerator in 2015, Travel Recon has grown to have employees all over Colorado, including an operations center in Montrose and an administrative office in Colorado Springs. Coupling the higher availability of veteran talent with the state’s growing cybersecurity industry, it makes sense the company would focus on hiring Colorado veterans. Houchens has other reasons to stay in-state, too.
“I was stationed in Colorado and fell in love with the state,” he said. “After setting down some roots here, I’ve also realized there’s an emerging entrepreneurial community and the infrastructure to support growing companies is continuing to get better. If you look at cost of living and doing business, I think Colorado’s competitive and it’s also just a great place to live.”
Photos via Travel Recon and social media.
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