Ten years after leaving Cuba with a suitcase and, as he puts it, an appetite to take on the world, Fabián Rodríguez gave Los Angeles Tribune’s platforms an exclusive interview about the B2B platform already connecting tens of thousands of travel agencies worldwide, and previewed the launch of the app that will bring that same model directly to consumers.
In an industry where booking a flight, a hotel and luggage insurance still means logging into three different platforms, waiting on three different responses and trusting three different sets of fine print, ServiceTrip is proposing to erase that friction altogether: one platform, in real time, where a travel agency can handle everything its client needs, from the plane ticket to the Uber waiting at baggage claim, without emails, without quotes sitting in limbo, and without commissions trapped for weeks. It is, according to its founder, the model the industry needed and that no one else had fully dared to build: more than 68,000 travel agencies worldwide already operate on the system, and the company is now preparing to bring it directly to consumers through a mobile app.
Behind that bet is Fabián Rodríguez, founder and CEO of ServiceTrip, just 26 years old. Born in Cuba, he arrived in the United States a decade ago, first to New Jersey and now based in Houston. He built the platform after years of working as a travel agent himself and discovering, again and again, that no tool on the market solved the problem in its entirety. Rodríguez spoke exclusively with Los Angeles Tribune’s platforms about how ServiceTrip came to be, what sets it apart, and the company’s plans to expand toward the end consumer.
The idea grew out of a very specific frustration. Before founding the company, Rodríguez spent nearly two years working as a travel agent, registered with several of the industry’s best-known platforms. There, he found the same pattern over and over: “On one platform you’d find a good price, but no support. On another there was support, but no price,” he says. None of them solved the whole problem, and none left the passenger protected when something- a canceled flight, a hotel missing from the system, a lost suitcase- went wrong. That gap, between what travel technology promises and what a traveler actually experiences when they need help, is the reason Rodríguez says ServiceTrip exists.
From Loading Boxes to Building an Empire
Rodríguez didn’t arrive in the United States with a business plan. He left Cuba at 18, as most Cuban emigrants do: hungry for freedom and carrying more dreams than luggage. He arrived in New Jersey, where his family took him in, with what most immigrants arrive with: a drive to get ahead and no certainty about how. His first years there were spent working in a warehouse, “loading boxes like everyone else,” until he decided to get into the travel business: hotels, flights, bookings. There, while learning the trade from the inside, he discovered, through trial and error, how pricing algorithms worked, what tricks platforms used and, above all, where the cracks in the system were.
The idea for ServiceTrip was born in 2019, a year before the pandemic brought the world to a halt. When travel stopped in 2020, Rodríguez used that industry dead time for the opposite: building. “It was an important year to develop this a lot more,” he acknowledges. While the rest of the sector struggled to survive, he was coding, negotiating partnerships and assembling, night after night, the architecture of what is now ServiceTrip.
It wasn’t a straight path. He recalls calling people with industry experience for advice and hitting more closed doors than open ones. “No, I don’t know, I don’t remember, I couldn’t do this,” he recalls being told. There were nights he thought about giving up. “I thought about dropping ServiceTrip many times,” he admits, “because there’s a moment when you think: I’m building an empire. But God is going to launch it when it’s time to launch it, not when you want to.”
The Problem No Platform Wanted to Solve
To understand why ServiceTrip matters, you first have to understand what it’s up against. Much of the travel industry, both consumer-facing platforms and those built for agencies, still runs on a book-and-wait model: an email goes out, a quote is requested, a response is awaited. When something goes wrong, support is often reduced to an automated response line or, at best, an overwhelmed call center.
“You get answered by machines… they didn’t read the fine print, so now you can’t get your money back.” Rodríguez says, describing the experience he lived on the other side of the counter, as an agent.
That, he says, is the gap the industry’s biggest names haven’t closed: the combination of competitive pricing, real-time availability and an actual human being available when a trip goes sideways. “We have live agents, a day team and a night team, seven days a week,” he explains. In an industry where artificial intelligence increasingly handles the first point of contact with customers, Rodríguez is deliberately betting on the opposite.
What ServiceTrip Actually Is
In its current form, ServiceTrip is a B2B platform built exclusively for travel agencies and agents, not for the end consumer. That second phase, Rodríguez says, is “still cooking” and will arrive via a mobile app the company is already developing. Under the current model, an agency registers at servicetrip.com and gains access, in one platform and in real time, to flights on every airline in the world, close to 7.9 million hotels, rental cars, private jets, cruise lines, more than 450 pre-built tour packages, and advance-booking group travel programs, one of which, already on sale for 2027, includes monthly departures of 40 people: twelve annual groups to destinations around the world.
The difference from the traditional model, Rodríguez insists, lies in the phrase “real time”: the agency’s client pays and receives automatic confirmation, without the wait for emails or manual quotes that still dominate much of the industry.
Access to the platform is free. The only thing that carries a cost, and it’s optional, is the membership tier: Bronze, Platinum, and Gold, activated either through direct purchase or automatically by monthly booking volume (50, 150, and 300 bookings, respectively). Each tier offers different benefits: the Bronze membership, for example, grants a 5% discount on various services and 10 airport VIP lounge passes that an agent can gift to loyal clients. The Gold tier, according to Rodríguez, includes a monthly Netflix subscription covered for the agent.
Layered on top of the memberships is a points system that functions as the network’s growth engine: an agency that refers another agency automatically receives 50,000 points as soon as the new agency activates its account, plus 300 additional points for every future sale that referred agency makes. Every plane ticket sold generates 1,000 points; every hotel booking, 8,000. Those points convert into credit within the agency’s balance and, something Rodríguez flags as a differentiator from the rest of the market, can be transferred to the agent’s bank account within 24 hours, compared with the 15 to 30 days commissions typically take with air consolidators and other platforms in the sector.
For new agencies, or those without full documentation, ServiceTrip also offers its own certification path to become a globally authorized travel agent. The full registration process, according to the company, takes one to two business hours before the account is active and ready to sell.
A Network of Partners That Goes Beyond the Ticket
Part of what ServiceTrip sells isn’t just travel inventory, but a layer of protection built on outside partnerships. Every booking on the platform unlocks a set of partners designed to solve the classic mishaps of any trip: a partnership with Uber offers a 15% discount anywhere in the world; a European partner provides digital SIM cards for travelers who lose signal abroad; another partnership automatically handles claims for flights delayed more than two hours, with compensation that, according to Rodríguez, can exceed 50% of the ticket’s cost; and a baggage insurance partner covers, at different premium tiers, compensation of up to $1,000, $1,500 or $4,000 if a suitcase doesn’t turn up within 72 hours of a claim.
These are partnerships that didn’t come easily, Rodríguez acknowledges. “One partnership was the hardest to land, getting them to trust us,” he says of the process of convincing already-established brands to bet on a new platform. His pitch, he says, was to lean on the size of the community he’d already built: “I told them: I know you’re a big global company, that’s great, but on my end, once you start with me you’re going to have 68,000 agencies seeing you, and each of those agencies has its own clients.”
From Paper Tickets to a Click: How the Travel Industry Changed
The history of travel agencies is, at its core, the history of how long it takes a customer to get an answer. For decades, planning a trip meant sitting down with an agent, waiting for them to call airlines and hotels, and trusting their judgment and their access to fares the public couldn’t see. The arrival of the internet in the late 1990s, and of the first online travel agencies in the early 2000s, gave travelers something they’d never had: the ability to compare prices and book for themselves, with no middleman. That shift, once billed as the end of traditional agencies, ultimately transformed them into something else: B2B networks, or “host agencies,” that give independent agents access to negotiated fares, booking tools, and commission structures in exchange for a cut of every sale.
That host-agency model has existed in the industry for years and remains, today, the backbone of much of the U.S. travel sector. What Rodríguez argues is missing from that model is exactly what he says he built: genuinely real-time booking within a single system, rather than a network of negotiated rates that still requires calls and emails, commission payouts in hours rather than weeks, a layer of passenger-protection partnerships built into every sale, and human support available seven days a week. “The secret to the businesses that will make a difference, not just now but going forward, is combining technology without dehumanizing it,” he says. That, in his view, is the mistake established players in the industry tend to make: they win a community through the personalized attention of their early years and, once they reach the top, let it slip. “When they get to the top, they forget where they came from, how they started, all the people who first believed in them.”
Phase Two: When the Passenger Becomes the Direct Customer
Everything above describes the business already up and running. What Rodríguez previewed in this interview, his first public appearance since founding the company, is what comes next: a B2C app, still in development, that will bring a version of that same ecosystem directly to the everyday traveler who doesn’t have, and doesn’t need, a go-to travel agency. “The everyday user, someone who travels but isn’t a travel agent,” as he describes it, will be able to download the app, register for free, and earn the same points agencies earn today: 1,000 points, for example, for a flight from Houston to Los Angeles, redeemable later for free travel. The app will also let users link frequent-flyer accounts across different airlines within a single booking, and will include access to the same live, seven-day support agencies use today.
The underlying vision, Rodríguez says, is to build two communities that feed each other: agents and agencies generating income by selling travel with the platform’s backing, and everyday travelers who benefit, directly or indirectly, from that same ecosystem of pricing, protection and support. “It’s a network,” he sums up. “They themselves, as agents, get the benefits, and they pass those same benefits on to their clients.”
Lessons From a Business That Almost Didn’t Happen
Rodríguez doesn’t present his story as a straight line. He speaks openly about the personal cost of building the company: the sleepless nights, the time his family asks for that he can’t always give, the potential partners who doubted a young founder with a new company. “I was told many times that I didn’t qualify, that this business model didn’t qualify,” he recalls from negotiations with established brands. His response, he says, was learning to negotiate without fearing rejection: “You can’t be afraid of no, because no is always going to be there.”
To anyone considering starting a business, wherever they come from, he offers five ideas, almost like a manifesto: never give up; fight for what you want; stay firm through setbacks, because there will always be setbacks; treat a “no” as a reason to push harder, not to retreat; and trust yourself, without fear of success. “This country is built for that, for you to come in hungry to get ahead,” he says. “Here, if you don’t make it, it’s because you didn’t want to.”
Asked how he sees himself in five years, he doesn’t promise an exit or an explosive expansion: he promises to keep going. “I’m going to keep working the same or more,” he says. “I have to stay on top of this all the time. It’s another child.”
This interview, the first Rodríguez has given publicly since founding the company, closes only the first chapter. The platform that today connects 68,000 travel agencies was, for years, just an idea several people in the industry told him wouldn’t work. The app that promises to bring that same ecosystem to millions of everyday travelers, he says, “is going to arrive when it’s time, not when I want it to,” the same line he once used to talk about ServiceTrip before it existed. If his story has made anything clear so far, it’s that betting against him hasn’t been a good bet.
How to Get Started
For travel agencies and agents, registration is free and happens directly at servicetrip.com: a live chat connects new users immediately with an agent over WhatsApp who walks them through the process step by step, and the account is activated, with every benefit enabled, within one to two business hours. Agents without full documentation can apply for the company’s own certification to operate as globally authorized agents. For the general public looking to be first in line when the consumer app launches, the most direct path remains the same: servicetrip.com.
About ServiceTrip
ServiceTrip is a B2B travel technology platform founded in 2019 by Fabián Rodríguez, headquartered in Houston, Texas. It centralizes real-time bookings for flights, hotels, rental cars, private jets, tour packages, and cruises for more than 68,000 travel agencies worldwide, backed by a proprietary points, commission, and membership system, as well as service partnerships with Uber and Netflix. The company is currently in the final stages of developing a consumer-facing app that will extend that same pricing, protection, and support ecosystem directly to travelers.
Learn more at https://servicetrip.com/login
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