Skift Take
The hotel tech group that Jonas Hospitality has put together through acquisitions of Leonardo, MSI, Springer-Miller, and BookAssist is admittedly small. But its creation says a lot about the pressures to consolidate in hotel tech. Experts debate the pros and cons of such roll-ups.
Jonas Software, a Toronto-based holding company for software providers across multiple verticals, recently decided to go big in travel.
Last June, it created Jonas Hospitality, a tech provider to more than 5,500 hotels, resorts, and spas in North America.
It built the company through acquisitions. In November, Jonas acquired Leonardo, which helps hotels manage their digitized visual assets to market their properties online. In 2017, Jonas expanded to Europe when it acquired BookAssist, a Dublin-based provider of digital marketing and direct booking hotels primarily to European hotels.
Jonas and some of its subsidiaries didn't respond to several invitations to speak for this story.
Yet it appears that Barry Symons, CEO of parent group Jonas Software, has begun to group some of the smaller tech vendors that have grown up to serve independent and other smaller hospitality players with property management tools and online marketing and distribution expertise.
"Barry appears to be picking up distressed assets, or at least those at the bottom of the shopping lists of more preferred suitors, in a bid to own the long tail," commented Sundeep Chanana, CEO of technology investment bank Horatio Partners. "It's hard to believe what he's cobbling together can compete with the likes of Sabre, O
