Travel Tech Essentialist #74: Flying Babies
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1. Accenture’s state of the hotel industry
The hotel industry will continue moving toward recovery in 2022, but the path will be uneven and potentially volatile, and full recovery is still several years away, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association’s 2022 State of the Hotel Industry Report, in collaboration with Accenture. Some of the findings:
Hotel occupancy rates and room revenue are projected to approach 2019 levels in 2022
The outlook for ancillary revenue is less optimistic
Leisure travelers will continue to drive recovery: in 2019, business travelers made up 53% of industry room revenue; in 2022, it is projected to represent just 44%
Business travel is expected to remain down more than 20% for much of the year, while just 58% of meetings and events are expected to return.
Changing traveler segments, including the rapid rise of bleisure travelers are impacting how hotels operate.
2. Super Bowl LVI: Expedia vs Booking
Super Bowl ads are big contributors to the excitement of the game: nearly two-thirds of those intending to watch the event are at least as interested in the ads as in the game. According to a Nielsen survey, 27% of Super Bowl viewers report that the ads are the #1 reason they tune in to the game. Expedia and Booking will be representing the online travel industry in the Super Bowl ad battle field on Sunday Feb 13th, with 30-second ads costing up to $6.5 million with an expected TV audience of 100 million people to view them. Read more.
3. The rise of the solo investors
A new set of players has emerged in the fundraising landscape, distinct from angels, super angels, and VCs. Leading “solo capitalists” manage more money than many funds. Oren Zeev manages more than $1 billion without additional support. Elad Gil, Josh Buckley or Harry Stebbings manage funds in the hundreds of millions with similarly lean structures. Creators like Packy McCormick, Lenny Rachitsky or Nik Milanović use large audiences to secure allocations into competitive funding rounds. I recommend these two great pieces to understand the solo capitalist landscape and benefits: The Future of Solo Capitalists (Mario Gabriele) and The Rise of the Solo Capitalists (Nikhil Basu Trivedi). BTW, read in the fundraising section about Captain Experiences’ solo capitalist investors.
4. Crying babies are just trying to save us!
Air travel is synonymous with crying babies. This essay finally reveals the true nature of these in-flight conversations between noisy infants 😂.
5. How to start and scale network effects
Andrew Chen’s book “The Cold Start Problem” provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries—revealing what makes winning networks successful, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and why products that create and compete using the network effect have become vitally important today. Andrew Chen draws on his expertise as an investor at Andreessen Horowitz and as an Uber executive, along with hundreds of interviews with CEOs and founding teams. He shares how to build atomic networks, including identifying the hard side of the network, solving a hard problem for those users, developing a simple to use killer product to solve that problem, and ultimately delivering magic moments to them. Here is a short post with main takeaways of the book.
6. Travel brands and TikTok
In their last earnings calls, both Snapchat and Facebook agree that the future of social media looks like TikTok, as you can read in Stories are out, TikTok is in. Travel companies are taking notice. Booking Holdings’ CEO Glenn Fogel recently said that they were increasingly confident in the potential of social media channels and planned to invest more there. Hopper’s advertising is now almost exclusively on paid social. Hopper’s head of user acquisition believes that TikTok in particular represents a big opportunity for travel brands to grow organically: “It’s been very successful for us, particularly in times where travel might not be top-of-mind for consumers. Social is great for discovery, whereas search ads rely on people having intent and proactively searching". Read more.
7. Selina CEO discusses nomads and growth
London-based hospitality company Selina announced its plan to go public via a Special Purchase Acquisition Company (SPAC) in late 2021. Selina founder and CEO Rafael Museri discusses why the company is targeting a digital nomad audience, the size of the market opportunity and the brand's competition in the accommodations space. Read more - Phocuswire.
8. Growth in airline ancillaries
Last week LocalGlobe (pre-seed and seed VC) and sister fund Latitude (series B onward) put together an interesting online travel event. It was great to hear about the growth of Gordian Software, a startup founded in 2017 that makes it easy to sell airline ancillaries. Gordian’s founder Stephen Grabowski shared with us the deck he presented at the event.
9. OTA and Metasearch stock market performance
eDreams’ stock price is down 17% year to date, the biggest drop of all the competitors in this graph. However, from Feb 2021 to Feb 2022 eDreams stock has doubled, marking the best year over year performance on this list. Lastminute has also had a very strong year over year improvement of 75%. Tripadvisor, Trip.com and Airbnb are down around 25% YoY. Despegar has the best year to date stock performance (+16.4%).
10. Fundraising
Germany-based boutique hotel and short term rental tech platform Numa raised a $45 million round round led by DN Capital.
Brazilian PropTech startup Tabas announced a $14 million Series A round, led by Blueground, a PropTech company that recently secured $180 million in Series C.
Austin-based Captain Experiences closed a $2 million seed led by Looking Glass Capital with participation from Andrew Chen (Andreessen Horowitz), Packy McCormick (Not Boring Capital) and others. Its focus now is on US saltwater fishing, but its mission is to makes booking outdoor sports guides quick and easy, for all sports and geographies.
TripActions has reached an agreement to acquire the 10th largest German TMC Comtravo in a deal it says will see half of its overall business originating in Europe.
Travel Tech Essentialist job board
The Travel Essentialist job board can be a great resource whether you’re hiring or looking to be hired. Here are just a few of the amazing jobs seen on the board…
Bob W: Recruiter (London, Tallinn)
Caravelo: Strategic Account Director (Barcelona)
Gordian: Product Manager (Bellevue WA, Remote)
FLYR Labs: Program Manager (Remote)
Browse more open roles (or add your own open roles) at Travel Tech Essentialist Job Board
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Have a great rest of the week,
Mauricio