Germany Makes Strides to Become 'Europe's Silicon Valley' for Travel Startups
Skift Take
Germany's travel startup scene used to be barely breathing. But with the fundings of HomeToGo, GoEuro, and Tourlane this year, the country's day in the sun has arrived thanks to a few factors, including more funding, bolder thinking, and better mentorship.
In a job advertisement posted this month, Comtravo, which provides travel management services to small and medium-sized businesses, sought a backend engineer position. The ad talked up working "in Berlin, the Silicon Valley of Europe!" and how the job offered a chance to work with a team that "has already successfully built up several global businesses" and a chance to gain "access to a great network of entrepreneurs in Berlin and some of the best travel and business-to-business investors in Europe."
Five or 10 years ago, such claims by a travel startup would have been laughable. But today they've become plausible.
In the past, if you were looking for thriving travel startups, you didn't look to Germany first. Trivago, the hotel search engine based, was one of the only young travel companies based in Germany to scale up and go global in the past decade.
Yet 2018 may go down in the books as the year when Germany symbolically took a long stride toward changing that reputation when several of its travel startups received record funding rounds.
A star example is HomeToGo, a search engine for vacation rentals, which this year raised an undisclosed multi-million euro funding round that brought its total raised since its founding three years ago to more than $150 million.
HomeToGo acquired the assets of its rival, the Silicon Valley-based Tripping.com this year. The move was the clearest s
