Travelport Makes Strategic Investment to Increase Presence in German Leisure Travel Industry

Travelport, a leading Travel Commerce Platform, recently acquired a majority stake in leading German tour operator distribution company, travel-IT.

The strategic investment is expected to significantly increase Travelport’s presence and reach in the German leisure travel industry, which at approximately 26 billion euros, is Europe’s largest. A substantial portion of the leisure travel sector in Germany is comprised of tour operators offering their content, either on a pre-packaged or dynamically packaged basis. travel-IT provides a platform that enables the real time offer, search and booking of the unique content from all the major operators serving Germany, to consumers who purchase from travel retailers.

“The announcement rounds off a year that has seen a number of important strategic investments for Travelport in our Travel Commerce Platform,” Gordon Wilson, President and CEO of Travelport, said.

Over the past two years alone, Travelport has strategically invested over $475 million in developing its Travel Commerce Platform to address the trends, inefficiencies and unmet needs of the global travel industry.

Travelport makes content available from some 400 network and low cost airlines, 600,000 individual hotel properties, all the major car rental companies and a host of other travel related content on its Travel Commerce Platform.

“We have expanded our Beyond Air capabilities in the payments, corporate travel and hotel distribution areas with our increased investment in eNett, our investment into Locomote and our acquisition of Hotelzon respectively,” he said.

“This latest tuck-in investment in travel-IT for Germany is consistent with our strategy to address the previously unmet needs of our customers and to redefine travel commerce using newer and better technology to enable unrivalled access to travel content through empowered selling systems.”

According to Travelport, the new investment will bring experience and innovation to travel-IT’s business, introducing this powerful and highly competitive means of access for German tour operators to sell the widest range of products possible through on-line and off-line travel agencies, with state of the art features and capabilities.

Travelport’s participation in equity of travel-IT was part of a wider transaction which also saw some of the leading German tour operators invest alongside.