Articles tagged “investments”

Expect more travel tech companies to mimic Plusgrade and get private equity backing to be able to do the acquisitions they need to grow during the recovery.

Luxury Escapes, an e-commerce travel deals business, plans to raise as much as $70 million (A$100 million). Makes sense. Travel companies with capital in hand may be best-prepared for the pandemic rebound.

So far this year, a dozen travel companies went public or made plans to do so. A couple of them may shine. But the odds are stacked against this year's IPOs, on average, over the long term. Find out why.

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.

Yanolja means “Hey, let’s play” in Korean. If Softbank agrees to play, the travel startup will have the capital to go on an acquisitions spree to bolster its global reach. That way it will be more likely to have a successful public listing in the U.S. later.

Big, global hotel companies weren’t exactly pandemic success stories. However, they still want to market the notion there is more value in a global network than going it alone as an independent operator. Getting left out of the expected summer travel boom is what it will take for smaller operators to accept that logic.

The call of the outdoors was loud last summer. Travel startups Outdoorsy and Collective Retreats are hoping that millennials keep answering the call post-pandemic.

Klook is winning investor confidence during the pandemic. The online agency is tapping into domestic leisure spending in several Asian markets while aspiring to copy some moves from Chinese superapp Meituan by providing more business-to-business services, too.

Some travel sector startups will use special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to go public, instead of doing traditional IPOs. The trend has the makings of an investor frenzy. Here's our cheat sheet, covered in six questions and answers.