VoyHoy Wins the Future of Travel Summit Startup Award and Daycation Wins the People’s Choice

VoyHoy an online booking platform, enables users to compare and buy plane, bus, ferry, and train tickets throughout Latin America. VoyHoy won the Future of Travel Summit Startup Award in Miami, FL on February 12, 2018. VoyHoy offers a simple and secure means to acquiring the best deal among thousands of travel tickets.

VoyHoy COO, Ignacio Vial and Co-Founder CEO, Jake Moskowitz winner of the Best Startup.

 

Daycation a Miami, Florida startup allows travelers to purchase day-by-day access to various hotel amenities, such as the pool or spa, starting at $25 a day. Daycation won the People’s Choice award. Daycation allows for memberships as well as individual 1-day pass purchases.

Matthew Boney Co-Founder Daycation winner of the People’s Choice Award.

 

Nicole and I had the pleasure of meeting many startup founders during the conference including both the VoyHoy and Daycation founders. Thanks to Raj Singh, JetBlue Ventures, Sara Jones, Boeing HorizonX Ventures and Kurien Jacob, Highgate Ventures for participating on the investor panel. You provided great insight for the travel companies in the room. Finally, special thanks to Pamela Granoff, Marianna Lopez and Tigre Wenrich for inviting Travel Startups Incubator to participate at the conference hosted by The Lab Miami. We will be back!

Investor Panel: Matt Zito, Moderator TSI, Raj Singh JetBlue, Sara Jones Boeing, Kurien Jacob Highgate

Pictures from the event:

Let the Acquisitions Begin

My earlier blog last month was prescient and great timing as the acquisition spree has started again in 2018 with a bang.

2018 will be the year of travel startup acquisitions.

The larger travel companies are taking more risks and startup engineers are wising up.

MEZI sold to American Express, reported at $125M-$150M all cash.
Routehappy sold to ATPCO.
Who is next?

As I mentioned, this is a continuation of the larger global trend that started in Q3/Q4 of 2017. I believe that it’ will be even more rapid in Q1 straight through to Q4, 2018.

With the new U.S. corporate tax rates lowered in 2018, the larger travel companies will have even more free cash flow to deploy into acquisitions.

What’s interesting about these two acquisitions?

1) The travel startups will remain independent subsidiaries of the larger travel companies with freedom to keep their management, continuing building what they started.

2) The startups were acquired by companies that were a) piloting the startups software or b) had started a commercial licensing deal.

I believe these acquisitions provide other larger travel companies and startups a playbook or template to use going forward to consummate deals.

At Travel Startups Incubator one of our portfolio companies similar to MEZI is in play to be acquired and we’re discussing selling two other investment portfolio companies to larger players.

Let the games continue!