Articles tagged “startups”

In the California gold rush, businesses once sold pickaxes to prospectors. In today's vacation rental gold rush, they're selling management services to the property owners. The safest bets are always adjacent services.

The moneyed set looked East this week as China had its second travel unicorn, Xiaozhu, receive a billion-dollar valuation, following in the footsteps of its rival, Tujia, China's first travel unicorn. Meanwhile, Ctrip bought Trip.com

Ctrip-backed Skyscanner will tap in-destination content from social reviews company Trip.com. But is the acquiring company's true plan to further mobile engagement? Or is it to nab a domain name that may be appeal more to Americans than Ctrip.com -- or Alibaba's Fliggy?

While venture capital funding of startups has dropped steadily since 2012, there are still ideas investors find worth funding, such as for short-term rental management, event venue marketplaces, and hotel distribution.

Groupon may have its struggles and many similar sites have gone out of business, but travel flash sales have a stubborn persistence — even if they would probably get additional traction in more perilous economic times.

Blockchain and China are both areas that investors find interesting, but blockchain requires a long-term view and China is really tough, especially domestically. Meanwhile, investors are pouring money into artificial intelligence and virtual reality, and are trying to sort out which travel startups working in these fields will make it to the finish line.

With this funding, Le Collectionist ramps up its marketing of luxury vacation rentals. But Airbnb and other tech and lodging brands may not let this profitable segment be siphoned off by this and other young startups for long.

Destinations can be doing a lot more to forge alliances between tourism and tech. London & Partners shows how.

This acqui-hire of Tel Aviv chatbot start-up Evature underlines the intense interest travel companies now have in natural-language search by text or voice -- and for the technical talent that can make the magic happen.

The 23-year-old CEO of loss-generating hotel aggregator Oyo Rooms has a business vision that has attracted total funding of $446 million to date. What could go wrong? Well...