Current Project
Checkout: The Travel & Hospitality Hackathon
One day, four travel and hospitality tracks, and a room of founders, engineers, AI builders, designers, students, operators, and product builders shipping working products. Sunday, August 9, 2026, in New York City.
1. The event
- Checkout, The Travel & Hospitality Hackathon
- Sunday, August 9, 2026
- New York City
- 330+ registered attendees
- Four travel and hospitality tracks
- Approximately six hours to build
- Short live demos
- Founder and industry judges
330+ is the registration count, not a physical attendance count.
AI Trip Planning
Tools that improve travel discovery, planning, personalization, and booking.
Hotel & Hospitality Operations
Workflows for hotel teams, guest experience, staffing, and operational decisions.
Local Experiences
Products that help travelers find and book experiences connected to local communities.
Sustainability & Future of Travel
New approaches to transportation, responsible tourism, and long-term travel infrastructure.
2. How the collaboration works
Checkout combines localhost:nyc's NYC builder and event-production network with WanderWorth's travel-industry relationships, sponsors, judges, prizes, and category context.
My contribution covers:
- travel-industry strategy
- sponsor outreach
- travel-company relationships
- judges
- prize partners
- partner communication
- sponsor packaging
- industry-specific positioning
- follow-up ecosystem strategy
3. Partners
Partner roles differ. Some companies sponsor, some provide credits or API access, some contribute prizes, and some help with community distribution.
Sponsors
- Stay22, Gold Sponsor: introducing its SDK to builders, supporting product discovery, and reviewing eligible project submissions after judging
- Propellic
- Arya Health
API and credit partners
- Lovable, powering the build experience
- ElevenLabs, credits provided
- Tavily, credits provided
Travel partners and prize partners
- Rove, confirmed travel partner
- Anecdote Travel, prize partner
- Nappr, prize partner offering a hotel stay across its participating hotel network
- AeroXplorer, community partner
4. Distribution
Registration and awareness were built through direct, unpaid channels:
- Founder-led LinkedIn posts
- Direct outreach
- Partner outreach
- Event communities
- Travel startup relationships
- Founder and creator networks
- Personal follow-ups
- Public event graphics
- Community referrals
- Relationship mapping
There is no paid acquisition behind this and no media budget. Each registration milestone became a public update, and each public update made the next outreach message easier to send.
5. Creative direction
The event identity had to communicate several things at once: New York, travel, hospitality, builder energy, credibility, scale, and the urgency of a single day.
The posters carry that work. They put the date, the city, the tracks, the partners, and the registration count in one frame so a single image can serve as an invitation, an outreach attachment, and a public progress update.
6. Where Checkout sits in WanderWorth
Checkout is the broad public entry point into the WanderWorth ecosystem. The curated travel-industry dinners are the smaller, higher-context layer that follows, and the partner relationships built around the event carry into the rest of the programming.
7. What I am learning
- Relationship-led distribution compounds over time
- Specific updates make follow-ups more credible
- Public proof helps partners understand momentum
- Event growth comes from repeated direct conversations
- Sponsors respond to packages built around their goals, not tiers
- A strong event brand cannot replace operational follow-through