The Inside View

RateGain paid $16.1 million for the acquisition, with an upfront payment of $14.6 million and a deferred payment of $1.5 million to be paid in one year.  

ADARA has raised a total of $67.1 million in funding over six rounds, with World Innovation Lab (WiL) and QuestMark Partners as the lead investors. As of September 14, 2015, ADARA had a post-money valuation of $100 million to $500 million. Source: Crunchbase 

ADARA is the fourth acquisition of RateGain after Myhotelshop in September 2021, BCV in June 2019, and DHISCO in August 2018.

Though the dipping revenues over the course of the last three years of the pandemic made this decision by Adara an inevitable move for sustenance and growth. Source: Tracxn

Deal Differentiators

Commenting on the acquisition Bhanu Chopra, Chairman and Founder, RateGain said, “We are delighted to welcome the Adara team to the RateGain family. Adara’s key differentiator is its access to permissioned travel-intent data from the World’s top travel and hospitality players as well as the destination marketing organisations and relying less on traditional methods of tracking consumer intent. Their focus on innovation and delivering customer excellence has me convinced that together we will help the industry with reliable end-to-end intent and real-time pricing insights making it simpler for them to identify guests, acquire and retain them.”

As per the investor presentation by RateGain, Adara will bolster both the DaaS and Martech business lines of RateGain while providing a strong moat for the business with 70+ data partners and expanding the footprint across all industry segments. Adara comes in with a strong profile, further bolstering the expansion and dominance of RateGain in the travel and hospitality industries.

The Bigger Picture

A platform like this is necessary today for the industry to react to shifting customer expectations.

• Travellers are increasingly turning to digital channels for inspiration, research, booking, and engagement, making it more expensive for brands to attract them as customers. 
• As a result of rising costs and the desire for more distinctive experiences, customers are looking to test out various brands that can offer them more value through individualised experiences and offers, but brands that don’t offer these perks are losing out to competitors who do.

Our Take on the News

Even though leaving when you’re at the top of your game makes sense in this situation, the marketing landscape is drastically changing, making a data-driven strategy, the use of artificial intelligence to study consumer purchase behaviour, their interaction in the online world, technology enablement for seamless platform transitions, and curating experiential offerings all essential.

The timing of this transaction is unquestionably ideal, aiding the recovery of the tourism and hospitality sectors. Watching how this takeover develops and creates value in the near future will be intriguing.

The post Weekly Top News: RateGain Acquires Adara at $16 Million appeared first on TravHQ.

October has been an interesting month for the travel industry. Brands got into festive mood, investors poured in funds, unicorns grew bigger, interesting startups came up, established players started fighting for market share and some major events were held. We looked back at the month and picked out our most popular stories. Here is a short roundup just in case you missed them:

#1- Conversation with Stephen Ho, President APAC, Starwood Hotels

Asia is the fastest growing travel market and the habits of Asian travellers are changing fast. Hotels are adapting to the change to stay competitive with new businesses pouring in. We got a chance to have a conversation with Stephen Ho, the man at helm of Starwood Hotels in Asia to know more about these industry trends. Read the full story: “We have to constantly keep evolving & innovating”- Stephen Ho, President, APAC, Starwood Hotels.

#2- OTAs block OYO and ZO Rooms from listing

With the kind of pace OYO Rooms picked up while expanding its footprint, it was very clear that they will be a threat to the OTAs in future. With more players joining the game, the OTAs couldn’t just wait. They finally decided to block OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms, two of the biggest budget hotel aggregators from listing on their platforms to save their market share. Earlier some OTAs also launched their own budget hotel brands to compete in the fast growing space. Read the full story: OTAs hit back at the hotel startups, block ZO and OYO Rooms from listing.

#3- Sherri Wu on the future of Alitrip

Alitrip, the travel business of Alibaba quickly gained momentum in the Chinese market. At this point, almost every global travel brand is trying to woo the Chinese travellers because of the fast growth that market has been experiencing. Sherri Wu spoke during Web In Travel Conference 2015 in Singapore about the journey of Alitrip and their future growth plans. Read the full story: “What we want to do is: Innovation, Innovation and Innovation” – Sherri Wu

#4- Jonathan Hardy on Adara’s plans for South-East Asia

Big data is the most commonly used phrase in travel industry these days. Business are exploring the possibilities of serving their customers better by offering tailored options by utilising big data. Adara is one company that is helping them analyse customer data and derive strategic insights. We had a chat with Jonathan Hardy about Adara’s expansion plans for this region. Read the full story: Travel Data Company, Adara has big plans for South-East Asia & Pacific

#5- FlyZilla: Flight metasearch that drives direct bookings to carriers

On metasearch websites, the results are usually flooded with options from OTAs. TripZilla introduced flight metasearch engine FlyZilla which offers results from airlines only and drives more direct booking to their website. It could be something disruptive in the metasearch space which has been largely dominated by the heavy bidding OTAs until now. Read the full story: TripZilla introduces flight metasearch engine FlyZilla to drive direct bookings to airlines

The post October 2015 Round-up: Best in travel and web appeared first on TravHQ.

It isn’t surprising that big data trends are a number one priority for travel marketers these days since they help to analyse & successfully predict customer behaviour and improve the overall conversion funnel. While the implications of travel data are huge, it can be used to great effect by deeply looking at how consumers are interacting and making transactions during their travel journey.

Mountain View based travel intelligence company Adara is one organisation, analysing the consumer data and providing strategic insights to a number of travel industry organisations across the globe. Their recent Series C funding round of $23 million further reinstates the belief that travel data has a huge potential in the coming days.

Overcoming a shaky Wi-Fi connection, I managed to catch-up over a Skype call with Adara’s Jonathan Hardy who currently leads sales strategy and operations in Asia Pacific. Speaking from his hotel room in Hong Kong, Jonathan talked about a number of things including the company’s vision for South-East Asia and APAC.

Jonathan Hardy, Lead – Sales strategy & APAC Operations, Adara

Based out of Singapore, Jonathan leads the sales team for the APAC region which also houses Adara’s ad operations team. The company has formed partnerships with a number of sales houses in Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines to extend their sales reach in these respective markets. Jonathan also mentioned that the company is in the process of formalising their presence in Japan.

In Singapore, Adara has a data partnership team that is actively approaching OTAs, airlines, hotels, meta-search sites and all businesses who have a consumer facing website used by customers to book and plan travel.

Is Data Security a Concern?

With over 320+ million monthly unique traveller profiles, the company ensures data security with its proprietary platform Magellan.. Their tech co-founder Charles Mi who is an ex-IBMer has ensured that Adara’s platform is robust to manage data, identify users and serve advertising across the web. As of today, Adara works with multiple partners within each travel category including hotel groups, airlines & OTAs. It leverages data on their behalf to help them monetize the data and use it to deliver their own targeted advertising.

Part of this comes through trust, where Adara segments and uses data in a way so that there is no leakage between different competitive partners. Adara has a variety of policies and each data partner has a lot of control including filters on who can/can’t use data. At a campaign level data partners, get to approve or reject which builds on their trust. On a top line basis, Adara is also working out industry policies and guidelines that ensure trust among stakeholders.

How can Adara help the travel industry?

Where Adara can really add value to the travel industry is by leveraging the data to its true potential. The data comes in from various sources such as hotels, airlines, meta-search companies and the challenge is to tie it all together. With its platform Magellan, it is providing a holistic view of the traveller for players in the travel ecosystem with real time customer views and behaviours. This could mean anything from the path to booking or identifying the lost customer (For instance suggesting recommendations on choice of a hotel depending on user’s past behaviour and recent flight booking or offering an upgrade deal to customers about to travel)

When I asked Jonathan about their customer set in Asia, he said, “The big US travel companies are represented world-wide. We are working with the Asian arms of Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton Accor & Intercontinental etc. We have also signed with a leading South-East Asian Airline, we’ve signed up with a number of OTA partners in the region such as hotelscombined.com and Travel.jp in Japan”.

What’s next in the region?

Jonathan is bullish about Adara’s growth in the region despite starting their operations only 12 months ago. Their impressive line-up of advertisers includes Singapore Airlines, Fulton Hotels, Banyan Tree and a bunch of leading homegrown Asian players. Con1`sidering that their head of business-development is from India itself, one can expect them to make some rapid strides here too.

Right now, Adara is actively working on plans for 2016 part of which would be focused on how to take advantage of the new funding. The belief shown by their Japanese investors further makes a strong case for Adara to make deep in-roads in this part of the world. To learn more about Adara, visit www.adara.com.

The post TravHQ Exclusive: Travel Data Company, Adara has big plans for South-East Asia & Pacific appeared first on TravHQ.