We analyse the current investment situation in the Travel Tech sector, an industry that has already accumulated $15,000M of investment through 1,300 deals since 2013. We also look at Hotelbeds' purchase of GTA and Amadeus Ventures' investment in Avuxi.
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Hotelbeds Groupthe international bed bank and provider of B2B services to the travel and tourism industry, has completed the purchase of GTA Travel Holding Swiss-style Kuoni Group. The transaction, the amount of which has not been disclosed, involves the merger of two companies with complementary activities and geographic areas.
Hotelbeds becomes with this purchase, and that of Tourico Holidays in February into the world's largest hotel bed bank. The company buys beds from 75,000 hotels worldwide and then sells them to tour operators, airlines and travel agencies. In 2016 alone it moved 26 million hotel bookings.
The Spanish bedbank has set itself the strategic objective of accelerating the growth of its business both organically and through mergers and acquisitions. The integration of GTA and Tourico enables Hotelbeds to offer an integrated and enhanced range of services, products and technology solutions drawn from the combination of the three hotel brokers.
GTA is a B2B travel distributor providing hotels, transfers and activities to the global travel industry, including intermediaries, online travel agencies and travel agencies. Its well-structured presence in the fast-growing markets of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East is closely aligned with Hotelbeds Group's growth strategy.
The venture capital firm Amadeus Ventures has made an investment in Avuxia startup based in London and Barcelona that uses Big Data to identify the best places to visit in a city. Although the company has declined to disclose the amount raised, the aim of this funding is to strengthen its growth, invest in new products and improve marketing and communication.
The Catalan travel tech shows the most popular places in any city, classifying by category the places and areas most appreciated by travellers and locals. Avuxi collects and catalogues the positive comments, check-ins, records and geolocated photographs found in more than 60 sources of information such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Wikipedia. All this information is integrated into its TopPlace platform, a database of more than 120 million points of interest, catalogued according to their popularity based on complex algorithms designed by its engineers.
The Travel Tech sector consists of companies that develop software and technology to provide products and services for the travel and tourism industry, including booking services, search and planning platforms, travel reservations and recommendation websites, among others.
This is a very attractive industry for capital that has already received a cumulative investment of $15,000M through 1,300 deals since 2013. To date, 2017 has accumulated $4,900M invested in 302 deals, which could make this a record year for the sector in terms of both number of deals and investment raised.
Geographically, we can conclude that international startups account for 2 out of every 3 deals. The US is the country with the most rounds (31%) since 2013, followed by India (10%) and China (8%). However, if we analyse the distribution of total investment, China rises to the second position with 25%, after the US, which receives 42%.
The Travel Tech sector has raised 25 deals of more than $100M since 2013, including two in excess of $1,000M. Accommodation offering platform Airbnb has attracted 3 of the 5 largest funding rounds.
Spanish tourism company Hotelbeds buys Tourico and GTA and doubles in size
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