2 Years of Travel Startups: Which Companies Survived and Died

Each week for the past four years Skift has been chronicling the latest travel startups to enter the market. When we began our weekly Skiftseedlings stories on startups in December 2012 the backdrop to the travel startup landscape was different than today. In 2012, most of the world's major economies were growing and recovering from the global recession of 2007 to 2009. In particular, the rise of mobile led to a flurry of entrepreneurs launching companies that wanted to help travelers plan their trips through mobile apps. Four years later, while Airbnb and Uber are grabbing headlines, funding in certain sectors such as hospitality tech has been uneven. Most of the scores of trip-planning startups launched during the past few years have died, according to our analysis of travel startups, because they either ran out of funding or shut down due to lack of user engagement. Skift also found that trip-planning was one of the least funded travel startup categories in 2015. Trip-planning startups had the daunting task of facing off against incumbents including TripAdvisor, Google, and Yelp, which claim hundreds of millions of users around the world. Based on our analysis about four out of five trip-planning or travel inspiration startups launched during the past four years have failed. Startups initially covered in Skiftseedlings ranged from just-launched to about a year old. Skiftseedlings is not necessarily a forecast for which platforms travelers will adopt or what software hotels will buy, for example. Rather, its purpose is to highlight how entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are responding to challenges and conflicts facing the global travel industry such as hotels' direct bookings push and how travel agents are innovating to remain relevant. Skift has covered hundreds of startups during the past four years and more than 150 are part of this analysis. Nearly 60 percent of the 150 startups that are part of this analysis have failed and are no longer in business. We considered a startup inactive, or dead, if its website no longer exists, its social media presence went silent, and/or its product seemed like it was broken beyond repair. We've seen startup trends come and go. Booking last-minute hotel rooms, as embodied in HotelTonight, seemed to be the buzz of the travel industry a couple of years ago but lately everyone's attention turned even more intently towards Airbnb and the sharing economy, as well as messaging apps and bots.