Articles tagged “startups”

This week, travel startups announced more than $139 million in funding for concepts including extended-stay corporate housing, short-term rental-style pop-up hotels, co-living spaces, and landing ports for flying taxis.

This week, travel startups announced more than $101 million in funding for a range of concepts, including cross-border payments technology, short-term property management services, digital marketing help, and hotel tech.

Is there anything that Trip.com Group (formerly Ctrip) won't do? LvYue Hotel Group is its upscale counterpart to Oyo, a set of hotel brands run in partnership with local operators in 10 Asian countries and run on cloud-based software.

This week, travel startups Travelio, Refundit, and Nowaday together announced more than $31 million in funding. Of particular note is Amadeus' backing of Refundit. The startup offers visitors to European Union countries a mobile app to speed up their claims for rebates for value-added taxes paid on retail shopping.

This week, travel startups announced more than $60 million in funding for a business travel management agency, a sightseeing and experiences agency, a white-label travel insurance provider, a short-term rental manager that uses master leases in Asia, and a student travel service.

Tech provider SiteMinder is the latest firm to make it easier for smaller hotels to adopt new tools from other third-party vendors to manage their properties. The trend could give the little guys more weaponry in online sales — and help SiteMinder become more valuable for hotels.

This week, travel startups announced more than $437 million in funding. Blockchain-based identify management, hospitality worker recruitment, airline distribution, attractions ticketing, and short-term rental property management were some of the hot concepts attracting investors.

If search for travel looking for door-to door trip options was a massive potential market, then Expedia, Booking Holdings, Ctrip, or Google would have already snapped up these companies, which have been laboring around that premise for years. This stuff is hard to execute, as the relatively modest exit seems to show.

FareHarbor and Bokun act as if they're unstoppably on the way to becoming giants. But the market for booking systems for sightseeing and experience operators remains very much in flux.

Short-term rental companies can't believe their luck. Private equity and venture capital continue to pour into their sector despite a hot market. Vacasa has remained an investor darling, in part, because it has branched into opening real estate brokerages to help boost the supply of units.