Articles tagged “private equity”

Few companies other than activist investor Elliott Management expressed a serious interest in acquiring Travelport. Elliott twice lost potential private equity partners after they reviewed Travelport's books. The deal price is underwhelming, and that's a signal that some things haven't been going the company's way.

Switchfly, a travel tech firm specializing in loyalty and e-commerce upselling, has been taken over by private equity firms Golub Capital and L Capital.

The early consensus is that Elliott Management put together a disappointing deal for investors. We cover the case for and against the deal here. But expect larger Travelport investors to consider resisting the deal or hope that a white knight acquirer rides in with a better offer.

The long-predicted buyout of public-company Travelport has happened at a premium of about twice the market capitalization of the company. Expect a spinout of the company's eNett payments division and the proverbial "cost restructuring."

Travelport has only been on the public market for four years, but hedge fund Elliott Management believes it can engineer a leveraged buyout that will unlock more value from the company. A spin-off of payments unit eNett is a likely early goal.

Did Hotels.com co-founders Bob Diener and Dave Litman do it again with Getaroom? Certainly not on the same scale, but Court Square's acquisition of Getaroom looks like a winner for the duo, who self-funded their latest venture in travel.

The last thing travel tech giant Travelport needs is to be sold to private equity. It's still digging out from all the debt Blackstone saddled it with. Our best guess is that it will be forced to partly sell eNett, a payments business.

It sounds like the potential buyers didn't accept the company's new strategy — or the buyers weren't willing to pay enough. Regardless, while it's certainly a risk, eDreams Odigeo is doing the right thing in diversifying its business and improving price transparency.

Thomas Cook India’s acquisition of Kuoni’s network of destination management companies is a story of how an Indian company becomes a global player overnight. There are also deep wounds about how a global company like Kuoni could end up being broken, literally, to pieces.

In this transaction, Pegasus Solutions unloads a struggling reservations business to a private equity firm, and a smaller Pegasus Solutions, still facing lots of issues, lives to fight another day.