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Here is your weekly overview of what’s going on:
- Together with Deutsche Bank, Emirates has just started rolling out a new payment solution: Emirates Pay will allow passengers to buy flight tickets without a debit or credit card. Currently only available for customers from UK and Germany, but with plans of implementing in other geographies soon. Less risk of fraud and eliminating credit card fees for the company – brilliant!
- After experiencing some 300% revenue growth during 2020, the South Korea-based travel startup Stayfolio has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding to expand their accommodation platform.✈ Over the last year, it’s become clear that sustainability is now more important than ever for business travellers. Businesses have been taking stock and realising that we all have to do more in terms of our environmental impact. You can check out TravelPerk leading sustainability solution GreenPerk that allows companies to offset their business travel carbon footprint through contributions to environmental projects around the world.
- While we are at it: This week TravelPerk announced the acquisition of ClickTravel, the biggest travel platform in the UK. This is TravelPerk’s third and largest acquisition to date and this investment validates their strategy of growth and market consolidation. Awesome!
- On an American-to-American deal, Amtrak negotiated 83 new trains from Siemens Mobility this week. We are talking about very modern trains, ready to replace some 50 year old rail cards and give passengers a comfortable travel experience, with the latest in sustainable and intelligent rail technology. Great to see action (and money!) going in this direction: the deal represents a $7.3 billion investment! Seems like our “new normal” might include more people traveling by train in the near future, uh?
- The US-based Luxury travel subscription company Inspirato is going public through a merger with Thayer Ventures Acquisition Corp. This deal gives the combined company an estimated enterprise value of $1.1 billion.✈ Airasia is going into new markets. If launching 15 different non-airline products was not enough to show that, it does get clear with the acquisition of southeast Asia’s leading mobile payments app Gojek’s business in Thailand. According to the CEO, their ambition is to be “a leading challenger super app” – and well, this just gets them one turbo step closer to that.That’s it for today, . If your company also has interesting travel-related news to announce, feel free to reach out to me via email.