TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY
Uplift, Inc. | August 19, 2021
Uplift, the leading enterprise Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) solution serving the world's top travel brands, has announced a new partnership with Tripster - the premier all-in-one travel booking site for one stop destination trip planning. Tripster customers can easily plan their entire vacation in one place and pay over time with surprise-free monthly installments through Uplift.
When booking on Tripster, customers can choose from more than 30 destinations across the United States and easily package hotel accommodations, experiences, theme park tickets and more all with just a few clicks. Customers can build their own vacation package and bundle these purchases for immediate savings. Tripster takes great pride in vetting every experience and destination to get the most out of each vacation complete with side by side comparisons and customer reviews to ensure the best experience imaginable.
"Tripster has always believed that a vacation shouldn't feel like work. With the addition of flexible payment options through Uplift, we've taken one more potential stress point out of travel planning by allowing our customers to spread the cost of their vacation over low monthly payments," said John Johnson, Founder & CEO for Tripster. "We selected Uplift as our exclusive BNPL partner. Uplift offered us the best suite of tools to help deepen our customer loyalty and increase average order values."
Uplift is seamlessly integrated into the Tripster booking process, on all platforms including desktop and mobile. Customers will see the total cost at the time of booking along with the monthly payment amount making it easy to budget for and experience the vacation they deserve. There are no late fees or prepayment penalties and customers can travel even before they are finished making their payments.
Uplift partners with more than 200+ of the world's leading airlines, cruise lines, resorts and other major travel brands to offer BNPL payment options that help people make meaningful purchases and get the most out of their travel experiences.
Tripster guests can pay through Uplift's flexible payment options for purchase amounts beginning at $100. For example, a customer may select a hotel package with Orlando theme park tickets priced at $800, instead of paying the entire amount up front, Uplift gives customers the luxury of zero money down at the time of booking and instead spreading the total cost over 12 easy monthly payments of $78.29.
"From coast to coast Tripster offers incredible experiences which are a great addition to any vacation and they are now even more affordable when guests opt to pay over time with Uplift," said Tom Botts, Chief Commercial Officer for Uplift. "We are honored to be selected by Tripster as their BNPL partner, providing more people the opportunity of affordable travel to create memories for a lifetime."
Uplift's BNPL flexible payment options are now available for bookings on Tripster in some of their most popular vacation destinations, including:
Florida: Miami, Orlando, St. Augustine and Tampa
California: Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco
Texas: Austin and San Antonio
North Carolina: Asheville and Charlotte
Tennessee: Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge
About Tripster
Find thousands of things to do and great places to stay - Tripster is a one stop shop to build the ideal vacation package. From fun vacations at top destinations across the United States to offering discount tickets to theme parks, tours, soft adventure, Broadway shows, Vegas productions, aquariums, and lots more. Book a hotel, condo or vacation home with Tripster as well, and save more money by bundling with tickets. In addition, customers can find valuable package savings and helpful customer support from real people. One account, one purchase, all in one place. Tripster is the easy route.
About Uplift
Uplift is the leading Buy Now, Pay Later solution that empowers people to get more out of life, one thoughtful purchase at a time. Serving the world's top enterprise level travel brands, Uplift's complete range of flexible payment options drive higher conversion and loyalty for partners, while giving customers a simple, surprise-free way to pay over time with no late or early payment fees. Uplift is currently available throughout the United States and Canada
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TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY
TripActions | October 14, 2021
In less than a year, TripActions has secured a second massive funding round – this time $275 million in Series F growth funding.
The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from prior investors Elad Gil, Base Partners and all key existing financial investors and values TripActions at $7.25 billion on a post-money basis.
The funding comes less than nine months after TripActions' Series E round of $155 million in January. The travel management company's total funding to date is nearly $1.3 billion.
Is an IPO coming soon for the six-year-old company? Michael Sindicich, general manager of TripActions Liquid, the company’s payment and expense management solution, says while an IPO would be a “natural fundraising opportunity and another milestone in our growth,” it is not planned for the near future.
“We’ve got quite a lot of cash. We’re making great revenue. We are not in any rush to take the company public at this time,” Sindicich says. The vote of confidence from investors, he says, confirms TripActions’ belief that travel and expense management is “ripe for a tech makeover.”
Despite the global impact of COVID-19 on travel, TripActions says it has now exceeded pre-pandemic levels in terms of bookings and revenue and has more than doubled its aggregate travel budget under management from February 2020 through the end of July this year.
The gains are due in part to a focus on acquiring new enterprise customers, targeted with the launch of TripActions Enterprise Edition in September 2020. Clients include Heineken, Crate & Barrel, Snowflake, Thomson Reuters and Adobe.
“We were there for these customers, they were switching from legacy travel agencies and booking tools, legacy expense platforms, because we were innovating, we were supporting, we were adapting to the way the new world would operate moving forward and that gave them a lot of confidence to actually make a change.”
Michael Sindicich, general manager of TripActions
Also adding fuel to TripActions' growth in the last 18 months: the launch of Liquid in February 2020, first as a payment solution and then in October 2020 adding expense management tools.
Sindicich says transaction volume is similar for Liquid as for core travel, and more than 90% of the new companies TripActions is bringing onboard use its full suite of solutions for corporate travel, expense, spend and payment management.
“Seventy-percent of expenses happen while employees are on trips,” he says.
“So we’re learning about the power of the end-to-end solution. We built Liquid as a separate team in the beginning... and are now seeing that both platforms together, it’s a one-plus-one-equals-three type of situation.”
Along with continuing to develop these products, TripActions will accelerate development of Lemonade, its personal travel booking solution that launched in October 2020. Lemonade gives employees at TripActions’ client companies’ access to negotiated rates and exclusive deals, notifications about COVID requirements and around-the-clock support for their leisure trips.
The company is also continuing to develop TripActions Team Travel, a self-serve solution that launched in June to facilitate gatherings of distributed employees. Earlier this month it added support for meetings and events to Team Travel, leveraging the capabilities it gained with its acquisition of Reed & Mackay in May.
TripActions will also add staff globally, expand its efforts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa – Europe now represents 30% of TripActions’ business - and, says Sindicich, continue to look for merger and acquisition opportunities.
“We’re always looking for companies that would make sense to acquire and work with and add to the portfolio so this could be another deployment of this capital as well,” he says.
“There’s not a prospect we are announcing or have in mind right now, but it would be natural for us to also look at other opportunities as well since we see Reed & Mackay is working so well for us.”
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INDUSTRY OUTLOOK
Tuniu | December 27, 2021
Tuniu Corporation (Nasdaq:TOUR) ("Tuniu" or the "Company"), a leading online leisure travel company in China, announced that certain senior management members of Tuniu, consisting of Mr. Donald Dunde Yu, founder, chairman and chief executive officer, Mr. Wei Zhang, executive vice president, and Mr. Anqiang Chen, financial controller, as well as certain employees of Tuniu, intend to use their personal funds to purchase the Company's American depositary shares ("ADS") on the open market for an aggregate amount up to a maximum of US$2 million within the next 6 months, pursuant and subject to the restrictions of, and consistent with, the applicable laws and regulations and the Company's securities trading policy.
"Although the recovery of the overall travel industry has experienced setbacks due to Covid-19, we remain confident in the long-term prospects of both the industry and Tuniu,We will continue to focus on providing high-quality products and services in order to strengthen our key competitive advantages and be well-positioned to better capture opportunities as the market recovers."
-Mr. Donald Dunde Yu
About Tuniu
) is a leading online leisure travel company in China that offers a large selection of packaged tours, including organized and self-guided tours, as well as travel-related services for leisure travelers through its website tuniu.com and mobile platform. Tuniu covers over 420 departing cities throughout China and all popular destinations worldwide. Tuniu provides one-stop leisure travel solutions and a compelling customer experience through its online platform and offline service network, including a dedicated team of professional customer service representatives, 24/7 call centers, extensive networks of offline retail stores and self-operated local tour operators. For more information, please visit http://ir.tuniu.com.
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