Chinese online travel agent Ctrip acquired Trip.com, a Menlo Park, CA-based travel planning and local discovery app and site.
The acquisition will allow global travel search site Skyscanner, also owned by Ctrip, to leverage select Trip.com capabilities under its own platform.
Skyscanner, which is available in over 30 languages and has 10 offices across the world, offers instant flight, hotel and car rental comparisons. The technology, community and content behind Trip.com will allow the company to launch inspirational and in-trip content to travelers, such as personalized, hyper-relevant recommendations.
This will enable Skyscanner to serve the needs of the traveler at every step of the process, from choosing where to travel to finding the best deals to get users there to helping them have the perfect experience once they arrive.
Founded in 2010, Trip.com (formerly called Gogobot.com) uses a combination of 19 “Tribes”, as well as predictive intelligence that takes into account location, the weather, and more, to offer personalized recommendations for where to stay, eat and play in more than 60,000 destinations.
This intelligence is layered on top of rich user-generated content from Trip.com’s community, including more than 1.5m reviews and 5m photos of hotels, restaurants and things to do around the world
Recommendations in hand, Trip.com allows users to compare and book flights, hotels, restaurant reservations and tour tickets through the app and site
More than 60m people have used Trip.com to plan their travels
The company had raised $39m in total funding from Expedia, Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe, Square CEO Keith Rabois and angel investor Oren Zeev.
Its team of 30 will continue to operate from their current office locations, alongside co-founders Travis Katz and Ori Zaltzman.
FinSMEs
03/11/2017