Our passion is travel.
Our expertise is technology.

We deeply believe in the power of travel advisors to make life-changing travel accessible and magical.

We believe travel advisors have been largely overlooked by the technology sector leaving advisors to piece together solutions as they run their businesses.

At Tern, we’re on a mission to empower advisors with world class technology that helps grow their business.

Our Journey

Tern is on a mission to modernize travel advisor technology.

Our founders meet at Handshake

In 2014, our founding team worked together as a part of the earliest team at Handshake. After eight years they had helped Handshake grow from a living room in Northern Michigan to the second largest professional network in the US and a $3.5B valuation.

Travel mishaps lead to advisors

Tern's CEO, David was on a trip to Greece in 2021 when he missed a ferry schedule change. Instead of enjoying their first Greek Isle, David & his wife spent six hours in a (very hot) parking lot waiting for the next ferry.

In that parking lot, David thought of his in laws & that they used an advisor for all their trips. He thought, maybe if he had partnered with Wendy he wouldn't be in that parking lot.

Learning @ ASTA San Francisco

David called Brian and Katie and shared the earliest version of an idea for Tern. What they didn't know was if anyone needed it.

They packed their bags and headed to ASTA where they talked to as many advisors, agencies, and suppliers as they could. The answer was clear. The travel industry was desperate for better technology.

Tern was born

David, Katie, and Brian started working on Tern in 2022 and went full time in 2023. Since then the team has grown and we remain laser focused on building incredible technology for travel advisors.

Our Values

Our values are fundamental to who we are as an organization. They are the framework for helping us make tough decisions and a guide for who is a meaningful addition to our team.

We are in constant pursuit of growth.

We’re endlessly curious and relish learning new things. We’re never satisfied with where we’re at and seek out ways to improve ourselves. We invest in our team and believe in growth at all levels.

We approach life with an optimistic sense of agency.

We aspire to build an enduring company and know the road to get there is full of peaks and valleys. At the peaks we take in the beauty of our accomplishments. In the valleys we strengthen our bonds as a team, taking ownership in finding a path forward. We strive to stay positive, kind, and authentic in every phase of the journey.

Our ambition is to be extraordinary.

We’re comfortable with the fact that the journey to get there takes effort. We put in the work to build something that matters to ourselves, to our teammates, and to our customers.

Our Operating Principles

Our operating principles add fidelity to our core values. They aim to articulate how we operationalize our values every day.

We remain laser focused on the needs of our users.

We stay close to our users to deeply understand their needs. We combine these learnings with a vision of how things might be to create products beloved by our partners.

We believe in the power of “and”.

Building a business is full of prioritization questions like “speed or quality?”. We look at such tradeoffs with skepticism and ask ourselves how might we change an “or” to an “and” - doing more with less.

We have an obligation to dissent.

We believe in ‘strong opinions, loosely held’. You have an obligation to advocate for your opinion regardless of title or tenure, especially if it feels like you’re the only one that holds it. We make room for debate and welcome differing perspectives.

We expect executional excellence.

We get things done at a pace that delights our customers and makes our competitors heads spin. We believe that compounding habits lead to sustainable productivity, consistency, and mutual trust.

We hire and promote servant leaders.

We stay humble and kind as we go through the peaks and valleys of building an enduring company. There is no room for big egos here. We refuse to let our team members and our customers down.