Startups

A $200 million funding round, coupled with new products from its recently acquired travel division, will see the Singapore startup Nium venture into the U.S.

Who knew that 2021 would be the year of travel IPOs?

The vacation rental market is big enough to accommodate multiple players with digital and operational savvy, including both Vacasa and VTrips.

This week TravelLocal and Trip.me raised funding for using digital tools to make travel agents more efficient, XOKind raised for its travel booking app Una, and MyBeezBox raised to help hospitality companies with online cross-sells.

You might have expected that the pandemic would prompt International Airlines Group (IAG) to pause its startup accelerator. But IAG's head of innovation, Dupsy Abiola, says the program gained momentum instead.

The conventional wisdom in the U.S. and Europe has been that business travel will be slow to recover easing out of the pandemic and that emerging markets in Latin America, such as Brazil, will have a snail-like rebound, too. Travel startup Casai is gambling that both ideas are wrong.

This week, travel startups announced more than $60 million in funding. Concepts included short-term rental stays in the U.S., travel services in Vietnam, and online travel sales in Russian-speaking markets.

Russia has an unpredictable business environment, and many of its households face income pressures. But the country should see a long-term shift from offline to online booking of travel, and that could be a tailwind for Aviasales and its peers.

Airlines need to work more closely with railway operators to fend off climate change activists. But they also need to test new technological ways of selling content from other suppliers. Let's think beyond joint ventures, codeshares, and interlining.

This week, travel startups announced more than $95 million in funding. Concepts included online travel and transit booking in India, the high-tech packaging of multi-day tours, tools to help agents book travel, and a travel brand for motorcycle owners.