City Discovery
Bring to the world market of “Tours and activities” a credible alternative to the leaders “VIATOR” of Tripadvisor and “GetYourGuide”.
CITY DISCOVERY ACQUIRED BY THE JAPANESE VELTRA GROUP
How did the founders of City Discovery take advantage of the Big Bang of the tourist excursion market to realize and maximize their personal wealth?
Sébastien Caudron, French digital entrepreneur in South-West Asia presents Emmanuel Issaurat, CEO of CITY DISCOVERY at Positive Capital.
City Discovery (2016), based in France, is a marketplace offering 9,000 activities, tours and airport transfers.
Positive Capital supported the founders in the search for new financial partners to pursue their growth.
After the acquisition of Viator by TripAdvisor for 200 million pounds sterling in July 2014 and the placement by Zozi and GetYourGuide of a huge capital in 2015, City Discovery was acquired by Veltra in February 2016, in a strategic move to expand the activity in Europe and the American market.
Today, VELTRA serve more than 2,17+ millions members through 4800+ partners in 150 countries.
City-Discovery.com is an online booking service that provides access to more than 5,000 guided tours and activities, in 400 destinations, available in 18 languages and with offices in the United States, France, Italy, Greece and in the Philippines.
While this segment of tourism would represent the figure of 150 billion euros per year in the world, few tourism professionals would have bet on the success of urban tourism, a market ultimately very complementary to the purchase of travel.
And yet, they either redeem themselves at the price of gold, or they regroup.
We find global players such as Booking or TripAdvisor (200 million euros to acquire “Viator”, the oldest company in the sector), but also unicorns:
Klook with 50,000 activities and services from 5,000 partners in more than 200 destinations worldwide, bringing the startup's total capital raised to date to $720 million (cf crunchbase);
and GetYourGuide, a serious competitor trying to break into the United States, has concluded a major partnership by obtaining an agreement with Expedia, increased to date to 886.2 million dollars (cf crunchbase).
It is by considering this clash of the titans that we accompanied the founders in a competitive process of transfer by affirming to qualified potential buyers the opportunity to acquire a decisive piece in this global game and thus obtain bargaining power extremely favorable to the owners of City Discovery.
After a competitive M&A process, the powerful Japanese tour operator Veltra has made an irresistible offer allowing the founders to maximize their personal wealth.