Vacation home rentals site Tripping.com raises $16m Series B
Vacation home rentals site Tripping.com has raised $16 million Series B in a round led by Steadfast Venture Capital that also included a diverse range of institutional and individual investors including 7 Seas Venture Partners, Enspire Capital, Azure Capital, former Expedia Chief Executive Officer Erik Blachford, Fritz Demopoulos, Monte Koch, Drew Goldman, Brendan Wallace and former NFL player for the 49ers and Raiders Shawntae Spencer.
Founded in 2010, Tripping.com claims to be the world’s largest vacation home rental site and boasts of having over five million listings spanning 100,000 destinations worldwide.
Best described as a meta-search engine, the site pulls in listings from partner sites including HomeAway, VRBO, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and dozens more, providing users a single platform to find vacation properties they may wish to rent.
Although perhaps not a household name quite yet, Tripping.com’s numbers show the site is growing rapidly, with a staggering 2,390 percent growth in monthly revenues compared to 2014, 2,918 percent growth in traffic to over 2 million unique visitors per month, and in comparison, a far more modest 158 percent growth in listings year-on-year.
The company claims that its services a sticky as well, with over one-third of users returning to the site to book rentals.
“Before Tripping.com, travelers would spend hours searching for vacation rentals across an average of five sites,” Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tripping.com Jen O’Neal said in a statement. “Now they simply come to Tripping.com to browse millions of properties with a single click.”
All that is old is new again
Meta-search engines are nothing even remotely close to being a new idea in the startup space, and yet seemingly no one has done it well before in the vacation rentals space prior to Tripping.com.
The numbers speak for themselves, they’re clearly doing something right with what they’re bringing to market, and the new round is simply validation of this.
It’s not clear exactly how much Tripping.com has raised to-date as they didn’t officially disclose the amount of their Series A round, although it was rumored to be in the $5-$10 million range, meaning total funding to-date would be in the vicinity of $22-$27 million.
The company said the new round would allow them to “fuel our growth, expand aggressively into international markets and enhance our mobile offering.”
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