Cleartrip acquires Flyin

Online Travel agency Cleartrip Pvt. Ltd has acquired Saudi Arabian Travel start-up Flyin for an undisclosed amount.

This is Cleartrip first cross-border acquisition and the Mumbai-based company is looking to step up operations in West Asia’s travel market, which has witnessed the entry of a dozen domestic and international budget operators such as FlyDubai, AirArabia, Pegasus Airlines and others. The company claimed that the combined entity of Cleartrip and Flyin will have a market share of over 60% in West Asia.

Saudi-based Flyin, which was founded in 2008, currently offers bus and flight ticketing and several holiday packages on its online portal. It claims to aggregate more than 320,000 hotels and 450 airlines on its platform. Cleartrip, on the other hand, was founded in 2006, and has been in West Asia for the past five years. It offers air, hotel and stays accommodation, and also aggregates local experiences on its portal.

Cleartrip claims to sell over 10 million flight tickets and 1.5 million hotel room nights annually. Cleartrip last raised an undisclosed round of funding from its existing investors Concur Technologies and Gund Investment, among others in June 2016. In India, online travel is largely led by players such as Cleartrip, Yatra and MakeMyTrip, which merged with Goibibo in 2016.

Paytm to acquire Travel portal Via.com

Flush with funds from Japan Softbank, digital wallet and e-commerce company Paytm is eyeing another acquisition. The payments firm has held preliminary talks to acquire online travel company via.com. Paytm, which is run by One97 Communications Ltd, is looking to invest close to $80 million to acquire the Bengaluru-based travel portal.

In March this year, the Alibaba-backed Paytm tied up with US-based online travel portal Priceline Group’s Booking.com, to expand its travel business. The company then said it will invest Rs 300 crore to further grow this business and that it is also looking to ramp up its Bengaluru-based travel marketplace team to over 250 people in the next two quarters. Paytm’s travel marketplace enables users to book hotels, flights, trains and bus tickets on a fast, secure and convenient platform. In January 2017, the Noida-headquartered company claimed to have crossed $500 million in annualized gross merchandise value.

Via.com, owned and operated by Flightraja Travels Pvt Ltd, was founded in 2007 as an offline business-to-business travel site. It currently functions as a travel deals aggregator and ticket booking site. Its inventory includes ticketing in flights, hotels, holiday packages as well as car and bus services. The firm had raised $5 million from Indo US Venture Partners (now Kalaari Capital) in 2007 and followed it up with a $10 million round from Sequoia Capital in December 2009.

Following its $200 million funding from Alibaba and SAIF Partners into to its e-commerce arm in March this year and $1.4 billion from SoftBank in May this year, Paytm has been on a multi-pronged expansion drive. It has made a number of investments and acquisitions and effected key appointments, internal movements, and new business strategies. Earlier this month, the company was in talks to acquire deal discovery app Little and online deals startup Nearbuy to strengthen its hyperlocal play.

Ixigo acquires IndianBackPacker.com

Mobile travel search firm Ixigo has acquired all intellectual property of Desi Backpacking Travelers Pvt. Ltd, the company that runs IndianBackPacker.com for an undisclosed amount. This is the first acqui-hiring deal for Ixigo.

Acqui-hiring is the process by which one company acquires another to gain access to its employees. In such an acquisition, the acquiring company may or may not have any interest in the target company products and services. The company wants to build a strong connect with communities of travellers who possess a shared passion, purpose or taste.

Ixigo recently received an investment from smartphone manufacturer Micromax and is looking to grow five-fold to reach over 30 Million monthly active mobile users by the end of 2016. There is a clear opportunity to build a community platform that enhances engagement and provides authentic and unbiased curated content for Indian Travellers.

Thomas Cook India Acquires Kuoni Group

Travel major Thomas Cook India backed by billionaire investor Prem Watsa Fairfax Financial Holdings has acquired Swiss Tourism major Kuoni Travel business in India and Hong Kong for Rs. 535 crore. Post the acquisition, both India and Hong Kong travel businesses will become subsidiaries of Thomas Cook and would function independently.

The Kuoni brand is licensed to Thomas Cook for one year in India and for five years in Hong Kong. All other brands of Kuoni such as SOTC, SITA and Distant Frontiers are transferred with the businesses. The acquisition is expected to help Thomas Cook to enhance its offerings on inbound, outbound, and corporate travel. Brands of Kuoni, especially SITA is strong in inbound offerings.

Kuoni was founded in 1906 and entered India in 1997 by acquiring SOTC Tours, which was one of pioneers of foreign tours in the country. Three years later, it took over SITA World Travels, a specialist inbound tours. SITA is said to be the largest inbound tour operators in India and with this acquisition, Thomas Cook can move up to the top rank in the inbound market.

In January this year, Kuoni had announced that it will exit its tour business in India and other parts of the world to focus on its core business as a service provider to the travel industry and governments, making it largely a B2B player. With the sale of its tour operations in India and Hong Kong, the company has completed the sale of its outbound business.

MakeMyTrip Acquires Mygola

The country’s top online travel agency MakeMyTrip Ltd has acquired assets of Mygola.com for an undisclosed amount and the entire Mygola team has joined MakeMyTrip as part of the deal. The acquisition is done through the NASDAQ listed company innovation fund, which was formed to invest in startup or early stage companies in travel technology space.

Mygola, founded by IIT Batch mates Bapna and Prateek Sharma in 2009, claims it can help travellers create custom trips in 15 minutes. Its app, which is present in 16 cities across the world, has up to 5,000 installs on the Google Play store on Android. Mygola mobile app uses technology to curate content, videos, open/close hours, tips from travellers, panoramic views all on a massive scale and specific to individual user taste. The acquisition could potentially give MakeMyTrip a greater foothold in the mobile space.

Since users book everything from attractions to restaurants and cabs from within the app, the company makes money through a commission every time a transaction happens. For restaurant booking it charges $1 per diner and between 5 and 10 percent from cabs etc. It also charges 5 percent from end users as convenience fee. In the original model, Mygola used to generate revenues from users asking questions besides earning a commission for bookings.

The acquisition comes at a time when the Indian travel sector is heating up, having received $71 Million in funding so far in 2015, mostly in early stage and seed funding, as opposed to $55 Million in all of 2014. Helion Venture partners, who led the $1.5 Million round in 2013 for Mygola in October, were also an investor in MakeMyTrip. Prior to that, Mygola had raised $1 Million from the US based accelerator 500 startups, Blumberg capital.

Expedia Buys Orbitz

Expedia Inc is the American based parent company to several global online travel brands including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Trivago etc. Expedia Inc companies operate more than 100 branded points of sale in more than 60 countries. Expedia also power travel bookings for over 10,000 partners such as airlines and hotels, consumer brands, and high traffic websites.

Orbitz Worldwide Inc is a company that operates a web site used to research, plan, and book travel. Recently, Expedia Inc bought Orbitz for about $1.6 Billion in cash to bring on the rival programmers and widen its consumer base. Expedia will be buying both Orbitz portal plus many other brands that it owns. The deal speaks to ongoing consolidation in the market, but also Expedia bigger competitive threat in the form of Priceline, which owns Kayak and other large travel properties, and the fact that perhaps Orbitz saw the consolidation written on the wall itself.

With the Orbitz Acquisition, Expedia would become the biggest player in the travel retail area with a market share of more than 6%, just ahead of Priceline nearly 5% share. That could be bad news for airlines and hotels that will likely lose leverage in negotiations with the sites. Hotels will be under pressure to list their rooms on the sites because of their reach. Expedia in 2014 saw the number of bookings rise 28 percent to 50 Million, and reported a profit of $398 Million.