Skift Travel News Blog

Tourism in Florida during the first half of this year surpassed the level during the comparable pre-pandemic period of 2019. Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing agency, published the numbers this week. It ballparked that the state drew 69 million visitors in the year through June 30.

Florida has done well at attracting international travelers, but it is still beneath 2019 levels. The state had 3.071 million overseas travelers, including a hefty number of Canadians, during the first half of 2022.

Last year approximately 45 percent of foreign travelers into the U.S. as a whole visited Florida. The next-highest attractor of foreign visitors was New York state, with 22 percent.

The company behind Soho House remains on track to meet its forecasted membership targets while opening nine properties this year. Membership Collective Group, which runs 36 Soho House venues, said it had 142,250 members for Soho House.

The company generated revenues of $243 million in the 13 weeks ending July 3. It has never made a profit, but in good news, it produced $15.3 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — a sign that net profit may be in the offing.

Investors punished stock shares of Membership Collective Group, however, after it announced that it would trim its revenue and adjusted earnings forecast for the year. The stock closed down 16 percent by the day’s close.

To offset inflation, the company has been boosting prices. But that hasn’t deterred interest. Retention has stayed at about 95 percent. The company had a record waitlist of about 82,000.

In June, the company brought its Ned brand to the NoMad district of New York, where it has welcomed about 700 members.

The earnings presentation is embedded below.

Skipper, a hospitality tech startup that offers direct booking tools for hotels, came out of stealth on Friday with a $5.8 million seed round. 

Google’s Gradient Ventures led the round. Other investors taking part include Pear.VC, Wayfinder, Uncommon Capital, ERA, angels Ryan Simonetti (Convene), Neil Parikh (Casper), and Aaron Frank (Final).

Here’s how the startup describes itself: “Skipper is building a new network for hotels that includes a streamlined booking engine to make booking easy.”

Upselling and cross-selling can boost the revenue of hotels along the way.

CEO Jason Shames previously led digital at the trendy U.S. brand Ace Hotels, and saw how challenging it was for independent hotels to create a connected guest experience similar to what many of the big chains offer.

“Our company aims to give independent hotel owners the tools they need to compete with large chains and online travel agencies and thrive on their own,” Shames said in a statement.

Vacation ownership is having a boom time this year as the travel sector broadly recovers from the pandemic.

Hilton Grand Vacations said Tuesday that its contract sales in the second quarter were $617 million, or 5 percent above 2019 contract sales. It produced a net income (a measure of profit) of $73 million on $948 million in revenue.

Hilton Grand Vacation has also been adding back employees after the pandemic crisis, having added 3,890 employees over two years to reach about 14,000.

Meanwhile, Marriott Vacations Worldwide Corp. said Monday that it had produced a quarterly net income of $136 million on revenue of $1.16 billion.

Some analysts have been making a case that timeshare companies would be able to handle a potential recession in the U.S. without much trouble.

Deutsche Bank’s Chris Woronka and research analyst colleagues recently wrote a report making this case:

“To be clear, Marriott Vacations’ business is well within the wheelhouse of being discretionary in nature and the core sales function can also rightfully be described as being a “big ticket” purchase, especially for first time buyers. But VAC also noted that roughly 40 percent of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amoritization is largely recurring in nature and isn’t directly correlated with contract sales. …. Management also noted that its customers have an average (self-reported) net worth of $1.5 million; 54 percent of Interval owners have annual income in excess of $100,000 compared to an industry average of 29 percent.”

—Deutsche Bank Securities

Sabre acquired payments technology vendor Conferma Pay based in the UK, on August 3, the travel tech company confirmed in a statement to Skift. The travel technology company based in Southlake, Texas, didn’t reveal deal terms.

“Sabre has had a successful partnership with Conferma Pay for many years, and Conferma Pay is the basis upon which its Sabre Virtual Payments proposition is built,” a spokesperson said.

Conferma Pay provides software and commercial deals to help the travel industry move to virtual cards, where a business traveler buys each thing with a separate virtual number. So-called virtual cards can provide more secure authentication than traditional processes and more easily adapt to mobile wallets, such as India’s Paytm and China’s Alipay. (Skift has covered this in its recent megatrend Travel Payments Find Path to Painless.)

During the pandemic, Conferma Pay signed many deals and created integrations to help spread the adoption of virtual payments. In late 2020, it helped Visa launch Visa Commercial Pay, a suite of business-to-business payment solutions that strive to replace most manual processes.

Business Travel News Europe was the first to report on the acquisition.

Inspirato, a Denver-based travel startup, said that it generated $36 million in subscription travel revenue in the second quarter — up by half year-over-year. The company’s full quarterly revenue was $84 million. 

The company’s Netflix-like subscription service, Inspirato Pass, had 3,600 subscribers in the quarter. For about $2,500 a month, Inspirato’s Pass lets travelers stay at about luxury vacation homes and hotels it partners with for specified lengths of stay.

In a concerning sign, growth in the company’s longstanding club-based program — Inspirato Club, where people pay a fee for access to discounted travel — grew only 4 percent to 12,100, year-over-year.

In another eyebrow-raising statistic, losses increased instead of shrunk. The net loss for the second quarter of 2022 was $7.2 million compared to a net loss of $0.6 million in the second quarter of 2021. Management attributed the rising losses to “increased corporate operating expenses.”

The company said it forecast that its loss for the full year will be between $15 million and $25 million on an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization basis. The company anticipates generating positive adjusted earnings for the full year 2023.

The number of Australians leaving for international trips has been more than 80 percent above the number of incoming visitors to the country.

Reporting on Friday, The Australian (paywalled) said:

Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed in May 420,110 people traveled abroad for a short-term trip, 81 percent more than the 231,480 short-term arrivals. The gap was more than double that of May 2019, when the number of outbound travelers was 39 percent greater than visitors.

The Australian quoting tourism data from the ABS.

The pattern creates a problem for domestic tourism destinations, who are not only losing foreign visitors but also domestic travelers going abroad instead.

The problem is of a manageable size and hopefully short-term. When viewed in context. Inbound travelers were now at 34 percent of pre-pandemic levels, while outbound travelers were at 45 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

But the international visitor gap is still a real problem for businesses struggling to hold on for the rebound now beset with rising costs for labor, supplies, and energy.

See the Australian Bureau of Statistics tourism data here.

Alloggio, a short-term rental property manager based in Australia, has invested $11 million ($16 million Australian) since its November initial public offering. The small company has acquired rights to manage properties and getting its own channel manager by acquiring Aabode.com, reported The Australian.

The company is strengthening its position as one of the country’s managers of short-term rentals and vacation homes through a series of acquisitions of companies, including Great Ocean Road Holidays, Best of Magnetic, Prestige Holiday Homes, First National Magnetic Holiday Rent Roll, and The Edge Holiday Rent Roll at Coffs Harbour.

Alloggio now manages about 1,950 holiday homes in the country. For fiscal year 2022, it expects to generate revenue of at least $14 million ($21.5 million Australian) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization of at least $7 million ($10.5 million Australian).

Cendyn, which offers customer relationship management and digital marketing tools to hotels, said on Wednesday it had acquired DigitalHotelier, which provides hoteliers with tools for distribution, web design, digital marketing, and rate-setting.

The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal. The London-based Digitalhotelier was a bootstrapped company of a few dozen workers. It saw a reduction in its business development staff during the pandemic.

The acquisition helps Florida-based Cendyn expand its distribution and eCommerce capabilities, which help hoteliers drive more direct bookings. But probably as importantly, it helps Cendyn reach more customers in Europe.

Accel-KKR, a technology-focused private equity firm based in Silicon Valley, is a majority owner of Cendyn.

“Our mission at Cendyn is to provide hoteliers around the globe with innovative technology solutions that enable deeper, more profitable guest relationships,” said Tim Sullivan, CEO and president at Cendyn, in a statement.

Boatsetter, which offers more than 50,000 personal watercraft for rental along with activities like wakeboarding, said on Monday it had raised $38 million in Series B funding.

Level Equity participated in the round. The same firm recently helped vacation rental property manager Vacasa go from startup to public company.

The Miami-based Boatsetter believes it can do for boating what Airbnb did for short-term rental apartments.

“By making it simple and worry-free to book an experience through Boatsetter, we’ve been able to welcome hundreds of thousands of new boaters onto the water for the very first time,” said Jaclyn Baumgarten, co-founder and CEO of Boatsetter.

The digital private markets team of J.P. Morgan Securities served as the sole placement agent for the deal.