When Vicente Carro and Lijing Zhou attended the X-Nordic Travel Contest hackathon in Reykjavik in late 2023, they did not expect to launch a company afterwards. Like most others, they joined the hackathon out of curiosity and interest. What they did not know was that their idea would not only win the hackathon, but also within a year, their idea would evolve into a company that would be accepted into an accelerator program, receive its first round of seed-funding and be on course towards market launch.
From hackathon winner to company launch
The hackathon in Reykjavik in November 2023 was a collaboration between the X-Nordic Travel Contest under Nordic Innovation, the Iceland Tourism Cluster and KLAK – Icelandic startups. The hackathon attracted a diverse group of participants – from AI specialists to marine conservationists, tourism and hospitality experts, designers, tech developers and many more. The challenge was to adopt AI and smart technologies to solve cross-Nordic tourism challenges and supercharge a more sustainable and competitive future of Nordic tourism.
Read more about the X-Nordic Travel Contest
After two days of ideation, prototyping, and pitching, the winner was selected by an international jury. Snotra Sustainability was announced the winner – and while this was the end of the hackathon, it was the beginning Snotra Sustainability’s journey.
Reflecting the needs of tourism business
From the beginning, Snotra Sustainability’s approach has been grounded in the tourism industry’s needs. Firstly, starting with the hackathon challenge that was based on the X-Nordic Travel Contest program’s mapping of cross-Nordic industry challenges. Secondly, after winning the hackathon, the Snotra team invested a lot of time conducting extensive interviews with tourism businesses and operators, policy experts and sustainability managers in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden.
From these interviews a clear conclusion emerged: While EU-level sustainability regulation is not only becoming more stringent, but also undergoing changes and increasing regulatory uncertainty, many tourism SMEs lack the tools, or the capacity, to respond. Many of the existing reporting platforms and tools are often expensive and built for larger companies. Furthermore, they are not tailored to the tourism industry’s specific needs.
Snotra Sustainability’s response has been to reimagine how sustainability compliance could work – technically and culturally.
Automating and humanizing reporting
At the core of Snotra Sustainability’s concept is an AI-automated system for data collection and compliance reporting. The Snotra platform will allow tourism businesses to input data not just via forms and dashboards, but through voice and image-based interaction, removing the need for costly technical integrations. The ambition is to offer a tool to the market that understands how SMEs actually work, adapting to their pace and constraints.
But Snotra Sustainability takes it further and addresses not only the act of reporting, but also supporting tourism SMEs in embracing the emerging market trends of regenerative tourism and sustaibability. This also includes addressing the behaviors that are involved with ongoing data collection.
For this reason, the Snotra team is also building more gamified, self-paced training modules as part of the platform, aimed at engaging employees across all levels of the tourism business. This means that from frontline staff to management, Snotra supports both a top-down and bottom-up approach to ensure that everyone knows what to do in daily tasks to support sustainability.
A X-Nordic turning point
Since the initial win in 2023 and the following support and mentoring of the X-Nordic Travel Contest-team, Snotra Sustainability has been selected to join a startup tourism accelerator prorgamme with KLAK – Icelandic startups, gaining access to mentorship and critical insight into startup development and scaling in a Nordic context.
And in spring 2025, Snotra reached another major milestone: Securing its first seed grant, marking a new phase of the company’s development toward a functional MVP and a go-to-market strategy.
Reflecting on the journey, co-founder Vicente Carro shared:
“This project has also changed my life. I joined the competition thinking ‘let’s see how it goes,’ and now I’m here - fully involved, and we’ve even secured a grant. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s still going.”
In a sector that often talks about sustainability, Snotra Sustainability will offer something rare: A practical path forward that makes sustainability and sustainability reporting accessible and integral to the day-to-day operations of tourism SMEs.
The X-Nordic Travel Contest program
The X–Nordic Travel Contest has been an almost 3-year innovation program, initiated and supported by Nordic Innovation and led by Group NAO together with Happy42 and Design Nation. The program has identified the main challenges of Nordic tourism, mapped the Nordic travel tech landscape, tested solutions with startups and established tourism industry.
You can read more about the learnings and findings from the program including Snotra Sustainability's journey in the Nordic Guidebook for Tourism Innovation.
Your company can also use the guidebook to find inspiration and practical tools to kick start your tourism innovation journey.
