Dakota Smith

Worth knowing

He has built the partnership side of a travel business to roughly $6 billion in annual sales, and he knows what it takes to embed fintech and booking technology inside banks, airlines and marketplaces across North America, Latin America, Asia and the UK. He also sits on the board of a Canadian carbon removal company.

Story

Dakota founded his first company, Traveler's Digest, at 18, then moved to Hong Kong to run it, growing the site past a million monthly visitors and signing several of Asia's largest hospitality brands. He studied Politics at Concordia in Montreal, and it was there that he started Hopper with Frederic Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk. Hopper spent years building software that predicts future flight and hotel prices, and the app has since passed 260 million installs and 169 million trips planned. The bigger turn came when that technology was packaged for other companies. Dakota now leads HTS from Miami, where the B2B division reaches hundreds of millions of travelers through partners rather than through Hopper's own app.

Highlights

• Co-founder, Hopper (2007), Montreal travel booking app
• President, HTS, now roughly 90% of Hopper's business
• Hopper: 260M+ installs, ~$6B in annual travel sales
• Board member, Deep Sky, Canadian carbon capture startup
• BA Politics, Concordia University