The Fastest Growing Travel Companies in America in 2013

And today, back to our favorite subject: What's actually working in travel right now, versus what gets funded and talked about. The delta between those two, starkly apparent in a list that's grown to be among our annual favorites: Inc. Magazine's "5000 Fastest Growing Companies" list.

This is a list of U.S.-based private companies, measuring revenue growth from 2009 through 2012. To qualify, these for-profit companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2009.

In this giant list for 2013 are 62 companies in the travel and hospitality space, and we've arranged them by total revenues over 2012.

The list is filled with mostly unfamiliar names. Some are holding companies in hospitality, travel management companies (for business travel), private aviation companies, B2B companies providing services to the travel industry at large, vacation and housing rental companies, and entertainment ventures. In other words, a group as eclectic as the breath and depth of travel industry, working beyond the ones with headlines.

For us, lot of those were names we hadn't dug into before. The surprise for us in digital world was CheapCaribbean.com, the online booking cruise specialist that's been around for the last eleven years, and now clocking in close to $400 million a year in revenues. Another one was SmartDestinations, an online tour booking company and platform that provides admission to more than 400 attractions across nine U.S. cities., and had revenues of above $30 million for 2012.

Among the ones most known to us, TravelClick was also big surprise by the sheer size of it, and we're even recommending Tripadvisor should be having a closer look at the hospitality services firm as a possible acquisition target. Flightstats, another familiar company, is small but growing very fast.

Related Link: The 2012 list: The delta between what’s growing in travel vs. what’s getting VC funding