Despite the powerful presence of established players, many of which have seemingly cornered various sectors, the eagerness to support new businesses never appears to subside in travel.
More than 350 individual investments have been placed into travel-related startups over the course of 2018.
These range from around 100 undisclosed levels of seed, venture and angel rounds to late-stage, Series E and F investments into businesses with already eye-watering levels of funding behind them.
PhocusWire's sister brand Phocuswright has spent the past ten years tracking some 1,800 (and counting) travel startups.
Its latest report (released in November) finds that travel startups founded between 2008 and the first half of 2018 have seen $19 billion come their way through either funding rounds or acquisitions.
And there have already been a number of significant rounds announced since its release.
2018 - a year of mobility
Gone are the days when brands from a mixture of sectors would be vying for attention at the top of the biggest rounds to come in during a given year.
The last 12 months have seen startups with mobility at their heart dominate the investment dollars flowing into the industry.
The absence of any new investment into Airbnb during 2018 helped ensure that the mammoth rounds of the year went almost exclusively to ride-hailing, taxi-hailing, and bike and scooter sharing companies.
The outlier in the upper echelons of the big rounds is OYO Rooms with its $1 billion round in September, led by Softbank.
Welcome to the Hot 25 Startups for 2019
But $500 million+ rounds into OFO, HelloBike, LimeBike and others show that alternative forms of ground transportation have become the brands of the moment, with investors betting on an appetite by consumers for such services and, perhaps, realizing that other markets are less than favorable for investment as they were in previous years.
That's not to say that the likes of Uber et al have not secured rounds of their own.
Uber (which has finally filed for its long-awaited IPO, a day after rival Lyft) took in $500 million from automotive giant Toyota in August.
This came just two months after fellow brand Grab secured double that number but from the same backer, plus it also later got $200 million from Booking Holdings.
Other rounds of note include $300 million into GetAround and $225 million to Ola in August and $160 million heading to Cabify at the turn of the year.
What about the rest of us?
Mobility may have dominated proceedings during 2018, in terms of the high-value rounds, but other sectors have obviously still managed to catch the eye of investors.
Tours and activities, for example, for all the attention it has received this year due to the moves taken by the likes of Booking Holdings and TripAdvisor, still saw some significant rounds going into startups.
Klook took $200 million in August, the biggest funding round in the history of the sector, with Tiqets ($23 million), TourRadar ($50 million) and Peek ($23 million) also getting some action.
Other notable developments included the obvious interest that business travel startups have managed to get from the investment community.
TripActions got the ball rolling in November with a $51 million round in March, followed by a further $154 million in November.
Rival brand TravelPerk caught $44 million of its own in October, seven months after a $21 million round, plus Rocketrip scored a $15 million investment in April from Google Ventures.
Sizeable rounds of note:
And perhaps the round that caught many eyes for its leftfield nature was $80 million that Culture Trip attracted in April - the first high-value round going to a content site (that wants to ramp up to become an ecommerce brand, too) in perhaps half a decade.
Learn more...
The latest Phocuswright report provides detailed analysis of these and other trends, including an expanded focus on the Tours & Activities and Ground Transportation verticals.
It is FREE for existing Phocuswright Open Access and Innovation subscribers (learn about how to become one here). For non-subscribers, it is available for purchase for $495.
For Phocuswright subscribers who are interested in digging further into the data behind the report, The State of Travel Startups 2018 Database is also available for download.
Other findings from the report include:
- The growth rate of funding to travel startups has contracted each of the last three years
- Funding to B2B companies has grown faster than funding to B2C companies in the last two years
- The most travel startups have been founded in North America over the last ten years, but companies in Asia Pacific have now raised the most money
- The top-funded vertical categories are Lodging, Private Accommodation and Car Rental
- One in four companies tracked have closed, while 11% were acquired
- The majority of travel startups have closed in the categories of Inspiration (51%) and Social networking (58%)