Online Travel Hopper's Metamorphosis From Flight Selling to Fintech
Skift Take
Travel startup Hopper has raised $175 million in additional investment, underscoring the potential of its financial services products and offering an interesting case study in new appetites in travel for fintech. It seems very much in the cards that the company will go public by, say, 2022.
Rather than crushing it, the pandemic helped travel startup Hopper speed up its metamorphosis from a mobile app that tracked changes in flight prices to an online travel company making a majority of its money from selling ancillary services such as price protection and trip protection.
"It's weird it took a pandemic to realize this, given that we first debuted the financial service products in 2018," said founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde. "But the crisis made it much clearer that the financial services increased the customer spend while also being higher margin than the travel products themselves."
Hopper said on Tuesday it had closed a $175 million investment, led by GPI Capital, a private equity firm.
Glade Brook Capital, WestCap, Goldman Sachs Growth, and Accomplice also participated in this round, which was all equity.
Hopper's Fintech for Travel
As Skift has reported, Hopper's "fintech" offerings now represent "a majority" of its revenue, which a spokesperson's email specified as "50 percent" of its revenue. Its solutions have been boosting the total transaction size by $40, on average, and generating an average 55 percent greater margin than travel sales, it said.
Hopper has dubbed its products "fintech" after the trend in companies offering financial services that use technology but skip the traditional bank structure.
"Hopper has created a large market opportunity with unique fintech products for the travel industry that applies an entirely differentiated and attractive business model," said
