Travello’s revenue fell to $0 for part of 2020 but that didn’t stop the start-up making an acquisition and raising $6.5 million from notable investors.
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Tripadvisor is courting partnerships with the issuers of credit cards to help boost awareness and usage of its new subscription product Tripadvisor Plus.
The Plus subscription product offers hotel discounts and other benefits to travelers, as first reported by Skift.
The travel company based in Needham, Massachusetts, said on an earnings call on Friday it is looking at a couple of ways to work with credit card companies.
Issuers of higher-end credit cards that already offer travel benefits might add a Plus subscription as a fresh reward to paying cardholders.
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When various coronavirus lockdowns in Europe fade away, tours and activities operators will find an assortment of new distribution partners with the latest being hotel-searcher Trivago through a partnership with TUI.
The TUI-Trivago deal follows last week’s announcement that Booking.com added Tripadvisor’s Viator as an attractions provider. Booking.com, which opted last year to all but cease building its own tour business, partnered with TUI in 2020 in a deal that has parallels to the one that TUI and Trivago announced Tuesday.
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Following its partnership with TUI’s Musement brand last year, Booking.com added a major tours and activities partner, Tripadvisor’s Viator, to its growing attractions business.
In their first partnership in the sector, Booking and Viator announced Wednesday that thousands of Viator’s attractions, tours and activities would soon be available for travelers on Booking.com. The companies said that the integration process would initially focus on experiences in major destinations in North America and Europe “with additional locations and inventory to follow over the coming months.”
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The pandemic has dramatically hurt the business of tours and activities operators. Yet, one of the largest online travel agencies for booking such experiences has had little problems getting access to funds. GetYourGuide, a Berlin-based agency, said Monday it had received a loan of $97 million (€80 million) from a consortium of banks, led by Unicredit.
Why does GetYourGuide need the money? After all, its expenses dropped during the crisis, with less need to buy advertising on platforms like Google to attract customers. Labor costs also dropped after the company laid off nearly one out of six workers in the fall. The company still has financial reserves leftover from its May 2019 raising of $484 million in venture capital in a round led by venture capital giant SoftBank Vision Fund.