SkyLink
Winter 2022AcquiredTravel Management Meets AI
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Turn this teardown into a decision-ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
Travel Management Meets AI
Turn this teardown into a decision-ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about SkyLink (W22).
SkyLink made corporate travel booking feel like a conversation with an experienced agent. An employee could ask for a flight or hotel inside Slack or Microsoft Teams, receive a few options shaped by company policy and personal preferences, then confirm without opening a traditional booking grid. Underneath that short exchange, SkyLink connected travel-management companies, global distribution systems, direct airline content, corporate rates, traveler profiles, project codes, and human servicing.[1][2]
Atyab Bhatti and Kush Maheshwari founded the company in 2021 and joined YC's Winter 2022 batch. By 2025, McKinsey had completed more than 30,000 bookings through SkyLink. The firm said a booking fell from about ten minutes to under two, 20% of U.S. and Canadian bookings moved through the tool, 95% of users rated it positively, and 85% became repeat users. BCD Travel then agreed to offer SkyLink through its own travel-management channel.[3][4][5]
Amadeus acquired SkyLink on February 25, 2026 for undisclosed terms. The buyer highlighted tens of thousands of completed bookings and said it would extend SkyLink's conversational layer from corporate travel into airlines, airports, hotels, and other travel products. Amadeus's later research calls it “SkyLink, an Amadeus company.”[6][7]
Bhatti and Maheshwari began discussing an AI travel agent while studying at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2016. The first concept was consumer-facing. Bhatti later said the software available then could not produce the required quality: “You didn't have large language models. Traditional machine learning was very compute-intensive and very slow.” The idea waited.[2][8]
Maheshwari became a software engineer at Rubrik. Bhatti worked in product at Malwarebytes, investing at Stripes, and consulting at McKinsey. Frequent work travel gave him the user pain; a McKinsey project evaluating a global travel business supplied the industry view. He saw an enterprise market where powerful reservation infrastructure sat below old interfaces and labor-heavy service workflows.[4][9]
The founders returned to the idea around 2021 as travel recovered and language models improved. Their business constraint was three-sided. Travelers wanted speed and preferences respected. Employers wanted policy compliance and lower spend. Travel-management companies needed supplier revenue and human agents reserved for work that required judgment. “Without the travel management companies, corporate travel just doesn't function,” Bhatti said. SkyLink would sit inside the enterprise chat channel, automate suitable transactions, prompt hotel attachment and compliant choices, and hand exceptions back to the agency.[2]
SkyLink handled the main self-service travel cycle in chat: search, recommendation, booking, modification, cancellation, receipts, and itinerary questions. It could plan multi-city trips, reuse a frequent route, watch fares, suggest hotels, ask clarifying questions, and route work to a human agent when automation failed. Connections included Amadeus, Travelport, Sabre, New Distribution Capability content, global distribution systems, Slack, Teams, and email.[1][2]
Personalization used traveler profiles, loyalty status, previous choices, city-pair behavior, corporate priorities, and preferred rates. Policy checks and project-code collection happened inside the conversation. The system might favor a preferred hotel rate, prompt an international roundtrip, show rail beside air, or warn that a session was about to expire.[2][4]
Read the complete post-mortem, the rebuild playbook, and the exact reasons SkyLink is still worth studying now.