JetBlue Backs Transparent and Accor Backs Treebo: Travel Startup Funding This Week

Travel Startup Funding This Week

Each week we round up travel startups that have recently received or announced funding. Please email Travel Tech Reporter Justin Dawes at jd@skift.com if you have funding news.

This week, travel startups announced more than $30 million in funding.

>>Transparent, a vacation rental market intelligence company, has received an undisclosed investment from JetBlue Tech Ventures (JTV), the venture capital subsidiary of JetBlue Airways.

The round brought the startup's total funding raised to date to $2.8 million from investors, including K Fund, Highgate Ventures, and Kima Ventures.

"Given JetBlue's interest in offering short-term rental options to its customers and the travel industry's recent demand volatility, accurate data is imperative to making sound business decisions," said Ryan Chou, an investment associate at JTV.

JetBlue said last November that it was planning to cross-sell its customers on non-flight products such as short-term rentals using a partner but marketing the rentals through a brand it owns, likely operating customer service in-house, as Skift reported.

Transparent pulls together a mix of first-party data from professional managers of vacation rentals and publicly available data on vacation rental market conditions. Its tools let players study trends, such as property management companies, hotel companies, destination marketing organizations, and distribution companies. Transparent tracks average daily rates, average lengths of stay, and average occupancies while keeping an eye on competitors and identifying new sources of demand.

Transparent was founded in 2016 by CEO Pierre Becerril, Nil Sanz, and Drew Patterson. It uses technology to recognize and de-duplicate listings that appear a