Secret Escapes Raises $67 Million: Travel Startup Funding This Week
Photo Credit: A holiday vacation escape in Thailand available via members-only travel booking website Secret Escapes. The London-based online site for discounted travel has secured $153 million in capital in the past few years. Secret Escapes
Skift Take
If he were around today, Gordon Gekko of the movie Wall Street would probably say, "Cheap money is good." A combination of factors has made it relatively more easy to obtain funding for startups in many countries.
Travel Startup Funding This Week
Each week we round up travel startups that have recently received or announced funding. Please email Travel Tech Reporter Justin Dawes at [email protected] if you have funding news.
The total funding publicized this week was more than $98 million.
>>Secret Escapes, a flash-sales site for luxury vacation deals, raised $67 million (£52 million).
Old Mutual Global Investors provided the investment. It was only last October that Secret Escapes had a Series D and debt facility round of investment, led by Temasek, for $111 million. Since its founding in 2009, Secret Escapes has secured $153 million in capital.
Secret Escapes claims to be profitable, has 50 million members of its free-to-join website, and that its revenue has grown at a compound 185 percent a year rate. It had told the Financial Times it had revenue of about $54 million in 2015 on gross bookings without tax of $225 million. But it hasn't broken out numbers since.
Secret Escapes has about 850 workers across eight offices, with more than 250 employees in London alone. The startup's success suggests that there is life in the members-only flash-sale concept — an idea that had a heyday in
