Contact: Scott Denne
Consolidation among online travel vendors continues as TripAdvisor reaches for Viator in a $200m deal. The purchase of the vacation activities website extends an acquisitive streak for TripAdvisor, which has inked four transactions this year and 11 since a late-2011 spinoff from Expedia.
Aside from being TripAdvisor’s largest acquisition on record – in fact, the price paid for Viator, a 250-employee company, is the only deal value it has ever disclosed – the purchase looks like most of TripAdvisor’s others; the company has been rolling up hotel bookings and vacation research websites for years. With this transaction, TripAdvisor will have spent $350m on four acquisitions this year, compared with six purchases for $35m in all of last year.
TripAdvisor isn’t the only one ramping up its consolidation activity. Travel booking is among the most mature sectors of the Internet – for evidence, look no further than Priceline.com’s $2.6bn pickup of on-premises software provider OpenTable. According to The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase, there have been 41 acquisitions of companies with a disclosed and estimated value of $2.9bn in the travel vertical so far this year, compared with just 36 deals for $2.4bn in all of 2013.
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