Articles tagged “m&a”

A public travel company growing 35% is buying its way into the meetings-and-events spend that managed travel never tamed.

Appetite for an experiences roll-up has long existed, but Covid put plans on ice. Now P&Ls have had a chance to rebound, and the timing is perhaps even better today, with experiences positioned as a counter-AI play.

M&A, venture money, buybacks, take-privates, a free quarterly read on all the capital moving through travel, what it means, and a first look at the decision intelligence Skift is building.

Expedia Group's B2B offering has been predominantly hotels. The online travel agency, which was founded more than 25 years ago, only recently began offering flights to B2B partners. Its strategy is to expand B2B into many more verticals.

By absorbing Rail Europe, a 5-million-ticket rail seller with 90-plus years of operator ties, Omio is consolidating one of travel's most fragmented, hard-to-book corners — and laying groundwork for when AI agents book trips, not just suggest them.

Hotels have chased non-room revenue for years without consolidating the fragmented tech underneath. This acquisition puts one shopping cart and one shared data foundation ahead of any new feature.

The sale gives Tripadvisor the cash to chase the $1 trillion experiences market through Viator.

Expedia spent years consolidating a sprawling portfolio of consumer brands into a unified platform, and is now becoming a B2B infrastructure company that happens to run consumer brands.

Private equity firms see the fragmented events industry as ripe for consolidation. The challenge is turning relationship-driven companies into scalable financial assets without losing what makes them work.

If chatbots use the same content to recommend the same places to everyone, travel is heading toward a homogenization problem, reckons Pangea. Its hedge: buying a ‘Spotify’ for trip itineraries.