Tech provider LeisureLink has been telling some of its customers that it has suspended accepting new reservations or modifying existing reservations via the travel reservations system it provides property managers, hotels, and vacation rentals.
UPDATE: 5pm ET: Today, in a letter sent to clients and first reported by VRM Intel, the company said it is shutting up shop.
“While LeisureLink attracted considerable interest from many strategic buyers and investors, management has determined that none of these parties are likely to complete a transaction before late Q4 of 2016.
This timing and the continuing cash needs of the Company has created a liquidity deficit which prevents the Company from continuing its daily operations....
At this time, all employees of LeisureLink are being terminated and the platform turned off”
(See reader comment, below, for the full letter.) LeisureLink's closure strands several resort/hotel type managers as well as traditional vacation rental managers.
Back to our original story:
Earlier this year, the company said it had received a $17 million round of funding, with investors Clearstone Ventures, Kinderhook Industries and Escalate Capital Partners participating. Since its founding in 2007, it has raised more than $34 million.
On Friday, SoCal Tech reported that the company has been sending email messages to clients that say:
"We've been working aggressively to complete a corporate transaction. Regardless of what you may have heard we are still in that process and anticipate a positive outcome."
Tnooz's voice and email messages to top-level executives this morning have not been returned, as of this afternoon. The only executive we could reach on the phone has declined to comment.
In August, Utah-based LeisureLink sold several of its consumer-facing websites to Aspen-based Ski.com.
Earlier this year, an official had told Tnooz that the company was working on releasing new, public APIs for distributors and suppliers. The goal was to enable LeisureLink rates and inventory to be passed over to Airbnb, HomeAway's Escapia software, and Seekda's Regatta booking engine.
In 2014, LeisureLink was bought by VacationRoost, which changed its group name to LeisureLink.
LeisureLink's online chat system for customer service was closed today. When Tnooz contacted an account manager by phone, he was telling customers that all he could say was that "the company is going through a corporate transaction and they are hoping to get the business details resolved quickly."
Apparently any such potential deal fell through.