Meet the team: Tomas Hoffer
Bridgify has been constantly evolving, and top talents have been a huge part of it. So that we can continue to optimize our travelers' experience, and make their trip as unforgettable as possible, we always strive to work with the best teammates, and employ like minded, talented professionals who share our passion for travel and technology. As a travel-tech startup with the name Bridgify, that comes from the core idea of Bridging between cultures, our team is based on people from different backgrounds and nationalities, with shared ideals - who embrace change & thrive on new challenges.
Today we're catching up with our Frontend Developer, Tomas Hoffer, to find out more about his own Bridgify journey, his views on the travel-tech industry, and a little bit more about him.
Let's start from the top, tell us your Bridgify story…
I am from Argentina, and I arrived in Israel in 2021. I started studying an ITS Fullstack development course in Beer Sheva, and as a part of the program I did an internship for 2 months at Bridgify, where I worked on one of the company's main products and developed an application for one of our most important clients.
It's my first professional experience in Israel as a programmer, and I’ve been very happy with the process. On the one hand, I have been able to develop my skills as a Frontend developer, but I’ve also been able to support Bridgify in its evolution.
I arrived at a crucial moment in Bridgify´s journey, when there were several changes being made in the development of our products. We were also going through a pandemic that really made the travel-tech industry slow down. To reach our goals, we established a very large internal tech project to ensure that all of our products were perfectly structured and ready as soon as possible.
After my internship finished, I spoke with the CEO of the company, and I was offered a permanent position at Bridgify in order to continue improving the Bridgify Itinerary Planner.
Tell us what it's like to work at Bridgify…
Working at Bridgify means working for the person who sits right next to you. This really motivates us to help our colleagues in a highly collaborative environment, generating better ideas and working within a strong team. Both Amit and Yaniv seek to create a very calm and welcoming atmosphere to develop your skills as a young professional.
By using a variety of tools such as Click-Up and Slack we are able to organize our tasks, and to understand the continuous product road map and the business needs.
From a traveler’s perspective, what is the most difficult part of creating a trip itinerary?
The most complicated and tedious part of organizing a trip is not booking the plane ticket or the accommodation. The most complicated part for travelers finding and booking the in-destination activities and experiences. This type of information is currently divided into many pages, blogs and sources that you just can't understand easily.
With Bridgify, you have the possibility to organize your entire trip based on your personal preferences, and obtain a detailed itinerary of all the different attractions and experiences on offer.
As a Frontend developer, what’s your role in helping travel retailers and travelers create the most epic trip possible?
As a frontend developer, my role is to make the backends’ information as seamless and Traveler-friendly as possible to our end user customers, including website navigation, applications, and of course, our core products.
What we’ve achieved within our programming team is to make the navigation of our products more intuitive, accessible and practical. We want to remove all potential barriers to users when planning their itinerary.
This means creating a Traveler-friendly platform that balances both technological and human components, which ultimately will motivate customers to keep using our products.
In your view, how do you see the travel-tech industry evolving over the next few years?
I think our industry had a very big impact from the pandemic, where Bridgify was able to evolve and adapt to the new tourism and traveling situation. Because of this, we have been able to grow organically and to stay focused on changing the travel-tech industry, one trip at a time.
I believe that successful organizations are those that are able to truly connect with people.
At Bridgify we’re trying to connect companies to those who want to plan their trip completely hassle-free, and within just a few clicks have a wide range of events and experiences to choose from. The industry is very emotive, and linked to situational, interests and experiences that are directly associated with the core essence of a person.
(Tomas Hoffer)
