If your name is Bunnik and you have a travel idea, it better be a good one, as two generations of travel trade leaders will be breathing down your neck to make sure it is.
Austin Bunnik – son of Dennis, nephew of Sacha, and grandson of Bunnik Tours founder Marion and husband Frank – thinks he has done so with the creation of the Mio app that saves the geo location of pinned Insta posts of dessert destinations and videos of that TikTok waterfall.
For years, travellers have treated Instagram and TikTok as the world’s biggest travel brochure. Scroll long enough and you’ll discover hidden beaches in Albania, a family-run trattoria in Sicily, rooftop bars in Bangkok and waterfalls in Vietnam. The problem has never been finding inspiration, it is remembering where any of it was.
The Mio app developed by Bunnik and mate Kevin Huynh – who he met at UNSW – aims to bridge the gap between endlessly saving travel videos and actually turning them into an itinerary. For co-founder Bunnik, the idea wasn’t born in a boardroom but came from the same problem affecting millions of travellers.
“Kevin and I have always been very into travel,” Bunnik tells Travel Weekly. Both soon agreed that corporate life was not for them.
“What we realised pretty quick is travel is such an incredible thing that people do, and because it’s so incredible, the level of difficulty that it takes to plan your own trip is maybe a little bit higher than it could be,” he says.
The pair noticed that while social media had become brilliant at inspiring travel, it was terrible at organising it. The lightbulb moment came after speaking with a friend returning from Europe.
“There’s one girl in particular I remember who’d just come back from Europe, and she took with her a saved video folder on TikTok that had 404 videos in it,” Bunnik said.
Rather than enjoying spontaneous discovery, she spent every morning trying to decode months-old saved videos.
“I was asking her about it, and she’s like, ‘Yeah, basically, what my process was I’d be accumulating this folder, and then every morning of my trip… I’d have to rewatch the videos and then listen for the location names and look them up on Google Maps’,” she told him.
For Bunnik, that confirmed what he already suspected.
“The potential of social media as a recommendation tool is so incredible, but the link between seeing something great and then actually going there and planning how you’re going to get there isn’t built out yet. So that’s what we’re building with Mio.”
AI doing the detective work
Behind the scenes, Mio uses artificial intelligence to analyse videos users share into the app. Rather than relying solely on captions, the system scans almost everything available.
“We’ll obviously look at the caption,” he says. “But we’ll also have a listen to the audio of the video. Then we’ll also do a scan of the visuals to pick up any text that’s on the screen.”
The AI extracts destinations, recommendations and practical travel tips before cross-checking everything against Google Maps to accurately pin locations. It’s working remarkably well.
The platform now contains more than seven million mapped locations and, according to Bunnik, identifies destinations correctly in around 99.3 per cent of videos containing identifiable locations.
For travellers, that means a saved reel showcasing five restaurants and three viewpoints can become an instantly mapped itinerary rather than a detective exercise.
Building momentum
Soft launched at the end of 2025, the app has only been publicly promoted for around six months, yet already boasts approximately 55,000 iPhone users. Bunnik confirms Android is next.
After seed funding from Bunnik Tours, Eucalyptus CEO Charlie Gearside, Blinq business contact app CEO Jarrod Webb, and Dan Nolan (the CTO of MagicBrief, owned by Canva), like many startups, Mio is still in the early stages of monetisation.
The company recently introduced a freemium subscription model for heavy users while pursuing a much bigger long-term opportunity.
Bunnik believes the travel industry has struggled to measure exactly how social media converts inspiration into actual visitation.
“I think there’s a lot of a lot of the travel industry at the moment see social media as still a bit murkier, a bit of a black box,” he says.
“What we’re trying to build towards is the attribution link to people being inspired on where to go to actually going to the place.”
He sees tourism boards, creators and destinations eventually using the platform to understand which content genuinely drives travellers rather than simply generating views.
Travel runs in the family
While he grew up surrounded by travel through the Bunnik family business, Austin says Mio isn’t about following in existing footsteps so much as creating a new lane.
But his grandmother Marion’s approach to understanding customers continues to shape the company’s philosophy.
“I remember a conversation I had with her last year and one of the things that really stuck with me was she was talking about the early stages of Bunnik Travel (now Bunnik Tours) and how the first thing she would do was go on a bunch of different tours to just really understand the clients so deeply,” he said.
“She’d invite them over to her house and cook dinner for everyone, and just really obsess over the customer.”
That same mindset drives Mio’s development. The founders personally read and respond to user feedback, with suggestions landing directly in their inboxes.
“We’re really encouraging of feedback from our users,” Bunnik said. “We get so many comments. It’s a lot of work, but it’s been genuinely one of the most rewarding things I’ve done so far.”
Startup life isn’t glamorous
Despite attracting angel investment from several well-known Australian technology founders, startup life hasn’t exactly become luxurious.
After Bunnik and co-founder Kevin both left their corporate careers, they are living on savings and continue working full-time on the business while carefully watching expenses.
For two founders in their twenties, that guidance has become almost as valuable as the funding itself.
Where everyone’s going next
One unexpected benefit of processing millions of travel recommendations is the emerging picture of where younger travellers want to go next. Almost a Spotify for travellers, says Bunnik. It could even be a handy tool for travel advisors who want to be clued up on destinations to share with clients.
Bunnik says Italy continues to dominate, but neighbouring destinations are rapidly gaining attention.
“We’re seeing the Balkans and Italy and then all of the islands around Italy are absolutely where everyone wants to go,” he said.
The clearest shift they are seeing is that young travellers have stopped aspiring to visit countries and instead are looking at specific towns.
“Italy is the perfect example; its small coastal towns and islands are surging. Stromboli in the Aeolians, Iglesias in Sardinia, Vieste in Puglia, and tiny Istrian towns like Vodnjan and Vrsar just across the water,” he says. “Thousands of savers, and almost every one saving a different little spot. The dream is moving away from Rome and into ‘the specific place my feed showed me that nobody else knows about’.”
The same instinct is pushing people outward too. Iceland doubled its share of saves in the past month, in the middle of Euro summer, and Norway is right behind it. And the emerging bucket-list savers keep landing on Jordan and Georgia.
“The industry has been talking about the Balkans boom for a while, and our saves back that up, Albania and Montenegro are still climbing. But if I had to pick the one to watch next off our data, it’s Slovenia,” he says.
At the same time, travellers are increasingly chasing destinations that feel undiscovered.
“There’s always this constant, ‘We don’t want to go where it’s touristy.’ So what little island or what little town is not too over-touristy but is still really cool?”
That search for the next hidden gem appears unlikely to disappear any time soon.
A bigger mission
For Bunnik, however, Mio isn’t simply about building another travel app. His ambition is considerably broader.
“I really think that social media has the potential to break down a lot of the barriers to organising great trips,” he said. “Holidays are some of the most impactful moments in people’s lives.
“What probably my most strongly held belief is, if more people can travel, the world will become a better place.”
Whether Mio ultimately becomes a global travel platform, an acquisition target or simply another successful Australian travel technology story remains to be seen.
But if Bunnik is right, tomorrow’s holiday may begin not with a guidebook or search engine, but with a reel that someone forgot they’d saved six months earlier.
