2 Years of Travel Startups: Which Companies Survived and Died
Photo Credit: Skift is looking back on the travel startups that have failed and survived during its four years of Skiftseedlings coverage. Pictured here is the team of Viajala, a flight and hotel booking startup for Latin America, at its office in Medellin, Colombia. Skift / Dan Peltier
Skift Take
Skift has covered hundreds of travel startups during the past four years to help readers understand emerging technology trends and venture capitalist interest. Here are examples of companies that have gone silent and those that have found an audience.
Each week for the past four years Skift has been chronicling the latest travel startups to enter the market.
When we began our weekly Skiftseedlings stories on startups in December 2012 the backdrop to the travel startup landscape was different than today. In 2012, most of the world's major economies were growing and recovering from the global recession of 2007 to 2009. In particular, the rise of mobile led to a flurry of entrepreneurs launching companies that wanted to help travelers plan their trips through mobile apps.
Four years later, while Airbnb and Uber are grabbing headlines, funding in certain sectors such as hospitality tech has been uneven. Most of the scores of trip-planning startups launched during the past few years have died, according to our analysis of travel startups, because they either ran out of funding or shut down due to lack of user engagement. Skift also found that trip-planning was one of the least funded travel startup categories in 2015.
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