Travelport, in a bid to boost its presence in areas "Beyond Air", has bought UK-based hotel distribution platform Hotelzon.
Terms of the deal are undisclosed.
Hotelzon provides various hotel distribution technology and services, including online booking engines and GDS distribution tools, to hotels and agencies.
The number of hotel booking nights running through Hotelzon's systems were in the 1.2 million range in 2013, valued at approximately Euro 100 million.
The company will continue to operate under its existing brand name and current CEO, Jani Kaskinen, will report into Niklas Andreen, Travelport's group VP and managing director for global hospitality, car and partner marketing.
The company was created in 1972 and has expanded to offices in Finland, Sweden and Romania, housing around 80 employees.
Until the acquisition, Hotelzon had been owned for 28 years by Esa Karppinen, chairman of Finnish investment group Berling Capital which his family owns.
Travelport CEO Gordon Wilson says:
"As part of our Beyond Air vision, Hotelzon is the perfect complement to our existing capabilities with the large, global chain hotels which we are progressively connecting to our system via direct XML capabilities and our aggregation of unmatched retail rates through our Rooms and More offering based on meta search technology.
"With Hotelzon, we will now be able to offer special corporate negotiated rates and other offerings from independent hotels to corporations and their travelllers as well as ensure a broader capability in the hotel distribution space for our TMC partners."
The acquisition is the first major deal for Travelport in over four years and comes a week after the company announced its intention to list on the NYC public financial markets.
The company bought Asia-Pacific metasearch engine Sprice in May 2010 (also for an disclosed fee), a move which essentially paved the way for the technology now running behind agency desktop accommodation service Rooms & More.
Kaskinen says:
"We firmly believe that with Travelport as our parent, we will benefit from their keen strategic focus and investment in both the hotel and corporate sectors. This, in turn, will enable us to further enhance our product and service offering as well as extend the range of international hotel content we are able to offer Hotelzon’s clients.
"It also gives Hotelzon’s independent hotel providers extensive new international reach through Travelport’s unsurpassed global network."
Here is a overview of the Hotelzon service produced earlier this year: