Travel Smart

Traxo travel app keeps your focus where it should be: on enjoying your vacation

Frantic travelers can relieve some of the stress that connecting flights, rental cars and hotel reservations can induce with Dallas-based travel app Traxo, which is designed to help users manage every aspect of getting from point A to point B. It’s like having a personal assistant in your pocket.

Traxo originally was created in 2010 by Andres Fabris, a University of Texas and Harvard Business School alum, as a tool to match users’ trips with any overlapping travels by friends or family members. But he quickly saw it evolve into a more serious travel organizer.

“We’re the one-stop shop to manage all those important details, so you can travel organized, relax and focus on enjoying your trip,” says Traxo founder Andres Fabris.

“Because the travel market is so fragmented — people book flights, hotels, car rental, ground transportation, restaurant reservations and activities across many different travel sites — it’s becoming harder and harder to keep track of all those details,” Fabris says. “Traxo simplifies all that; we’re the one-stop shop to manage all those important details, so you can travel organized, relax and focus on enjoying your trip.”

Traxo, available for free on iPhone and Android, aggregates travel accounts, enabling users to effortlessly organize hotel, flight and car reservations. Even in the booking phase, Traxo guides users to hotels that are recommended based on their unique preferences.

“We take into account your preferred location, hotel brands, star ratings and price points,” Fabris says. “We also show TripAdvisor destination information, including reviews of restaurants and top activities, integrated directly within your Traxo itinerary.”

Fabris explains that the app recognizes every step of your trip. For example, when you land at the airport and turn on your phone, the Traxo app automatically displays your car rental confirmations and membership numbers. When you’re in your car, Traxo provides directions to your hotel. All of your mileage and loyalty points are updated and displayed for easy access.

In addition to updating itineraries automatically, Traxo makes it easy to share travel plans and changes with friends and family. You can also access your account from the website as well as the app.

Changes this year have included contextually aware mobile apps and flight status updates. A new website is on the immediate horizon — “same great features but we’ve completely redesigned the experience to make it even more intuitive,” says Fabris, who adds that Traxo will continue to evolve to make users’ trips even more streamlined.

“If we’ve done our job right, future versions of Traxo will even be able to magically anticipate your intent.”

Traxo organizes all aspects of your travel plans.

Courtesy photo

Traxo organizes all aspects of your travel plans.

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Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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