Anecdote Travel: Bringing Back the Lost Art of Customer Care
It’s never been easier to book a trip — or harder to enjoy planning one.
Open your laptop, type in “Lisbon hotels,” and you’ll get 1,400 results. Prices fluctuate daily, reviews contradict each other, filters break. Even so-called “personalized” travel apps rely on the same scraped data and generic logic. The result: a world where technology has given travelers infinite choice — and almost no peace of mind.
Shrey Gupta started Anecdote Travel to change all that.
Anecdote is building a modern travel concierge that merges the best of AI with the best of human customer care. Text them your dates and destination on WhatsApp, and within hours you’ll get a curated set of hotel options — not scraped from the internet, but handpicked by a trained concierge who knows what actually matters: the difference between a “partial ocean view” and a view worth waking up early for.
At XYZ Venture Capital, we backed Anecdote because we think they’re leading something much bigger than a travel revolution. They’re leading a renaissance in service — one where quality, empathy, and attention to detail scale through technology, not despite it.
The Lost Luxury of Care
For decades, software has been obsessed with access: cheaper flights, faster checkouts, broader search. But access without care doesn’t feel like progress. It feels transactional.
Anecdote turns that equation on its head. Its product is not convenience, but confidence — the quiet comfort of knowing someone else has thought through the details so you can simply go.
Their human-AI model makes that possible. The AI handles breadth: parsing tens of thousands of hotels, comparing rates, and surfacing the right options instantly. Human concierges handle depth: context, tone, vibe, quality, the small things that turn a stay into a story. The result is a level of service that feels personal, yet works at scale.
Customers don’t just get the best deal — they’re treated like VIPs. They get breakfast waiting, upgrades unlocked, and handwritten notes on the pillow. They come for perks; they stay for peace of mind.
The System Behind the Service
The company’s proprietary platform ingests vast, structured, multimodal data about hotels — and wraps it in a workflow built for speed. Concierges can research, quote, and book trips end-to-end inside Anecdote’s internal tools. Each new request makes the system smarter, surfacing patterns that help future travelers faster.
But the magic isn’t in the tech stack. It’s in how the system enables people to do their best work. Shrey likes to call it “technology that gets out of the way.” It gives concierges superpowers, not scripts.
That design choice has measurable impact: higher customer satisfaction, repeat bookings, and an astonishing Net Promoter Score north of 9.5 — almost unheard of in travel.
At XYZ, we look for companies that do two things at once: deliver tangible product value today, and quietly build the infrastructure for something much bigger tomorrow.
Anecdote fits that pattern perfectly.
Today, they’re reimagining the travel agency — for those who want to feel taken care of without paying $500 an hour for a traditional advisor, or chancing the taste of Reddit strangers and chat bot hallucinations. At the same time, they’re building the rails for what could become a universal personal concierge — a hybrid AI-human layer that handles any high-context decision where empathy matters as much as accuracy.
If you can trust someone to plan your honeymoon, think of what else you can rely on them to do!
That Founder-Market Fit
Shrey Gupta is a rare founder who codes like a 10x engineer and thinks like a hotelier. We got to meet him when he was still undergrad at Stanford, where he was already in the game as an investor for Dorm Room Fund. He worked alongside our teammate JeanClaude Dorsainvil, who remembers Shrey evaluating companies by seeing how quickly he could rebuild their products.
Since then, he’s gone on to build natural language models for the U.S. government while holding cocktail labs in NYC, and at the start of Anecdote used to personally plan every trip the company ran. This mix of technical precision and hospitality instinct is Anedote’s bedrock.
Today, he leads a team spread across time zones — full-time concierges, engineers, designers — all united by one belief: that good service should be for everyone.
The company’s growth reflects that conviction. Anecdote has already booked hundreds of trips (including a proposal trip for one of our XYZ teammates!), earned the trust of repeat travelers, and grown entirely through word of mouth.
The Future of Hyper-Personalized Travel
Anecdote’s ambition is simple but radical: to make travel feel human again.
As their brand evolves — a balance of vintage romance and modern precision — Anecdote is becoming more than a travel tool. It’s becoming a companion. The friend who knows your preferences, your quirks, your favorite breakfast spot in Madrid — or that you do in fact want to spend 4 hours at the Louvre. The one who makes sure every journey ends with a story worth telling.
In a world that’s automating everything, Anecdote reminds us that technology’s highest calling isn’t to replace people — it’s to make caring for them easier.
That’s a mission we’re excited to back.
