Ellerston Capital, led by Ashok Jacob, is set to buy the Leibovichs’ stake of about 12% in Luxury Escapes. The secondary sale values Adam Schwab’s travel booking platform at $525 million, as the Financial Review reported on 24 September 2026.

Ellerston is targeting a shareholding of at least 12% and gets one board seat. Because this is a secondary sale, the money goes to the selling shareholders and not to Luxury Escapes. Ellerston expects to more than double its money and to earn a 5 per cent dividend yield before it exits in two to three years.

What Luxury Escapes does

Adam Schwab founded Luxury Escapes in 2013 and is its CEO. The company is headquartered in Melbourne, has offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore, and has more than 9 million members. It sells limited-time hotel offers, cruise and tour products to consumers and, increasingly, to travel agents.

The company took its first external equity in late 2021 and early 2022, when Pier 12 Capital raised a $125 million fund to buy a stake in Lux Group. Ellerston’s purchase comes about four years after that first outside investment.

Its traction numbers are specific. One in two Australians travelling to the Maldives books through Luxury Escapes. Its store in Chatswood, Sydney, was tracking toward about $100 million in annual sales. The company also runs a Melbourne to Maldives charter at its own risk. “We’re on risk, so if we don’t sell out, it’s on us,” Schwab said.

The Luxury Escapes Agent Hub

Luxury Escapes launched its Agent Hub in March 2024. The hub now runs in Australia and the UK, and thousands of agents use it for commissionable rates on limited-time offers, cruise and tour products.

Adam Schwab, founder and CEO of Luxury Escapes, told Travel Weekly Australia in February 2026 that the hub “could be a billion-dollar business for us in the next couple of years”. He added: “We now sell to agents and it’s one of our fastest-growing parts of the business.”

On growth, he puts margin first: “It’s easy to grow top line if you spend a lot on marketing. What we focus on is growing contribution margin.”

Other recent deals

• Fever raised US$250 million in primary equity on 17 September. EQT led the round, with Point72 Private Investments and Baillie Gifford. Fever’s own announcement calls it the largest round ever for a live-entertainment tech company. Fever operates in more than 55 countries, has tripled its revenue over three years and reports positive EBITDA.
• Laters.com, based in Singapore, closed a US$1.5 million seed round led by XBO Ventures and rebranded on 8 September.

What operators should read into it

Ellerston’s terms value Luxury Escapes on cash returns and a set exit: a 5 per cent dividend yield, more than double the money, and out in two to three years. That return case rests on distributions and not on growth alone, and it matches Schwab’s stated focus on contribution margin. Fever’s round points the same way. The company led its announcement with positive EBITDA as well as its growth figures.

For hotels, cruise lines and DMCs selling into Australia, Luxury Escapes now reaches buyers three ways: its members online, its physical stores such as Chatswood, and agents through the Agent Hub. It also carries inventory risk on its own Maldives charter. The Maldives figure matters most to suppliers, because one platform handles half of Australian travellers to that destination. With a new investor on the board that expects a dividend, the platform’s margin per booking will face closer scrutiny.

Key takeaway

Investors in APAC travel are paying for margin and cash returns, and Luxury Escapes at $525 million is a clear price point for a platform that sells to consumers, in stores and through agents. This quarter, a hotel, cruise line or DMC selling into Australia should check how much of its business moves through Luxury Escapes’ members, stores and Agent Hub, and what that channel costs compared with direct bookings. We expect the conversation about the capital behind these channels to continue at ITB Asia and HICAP in Singapore, 20 to 23 October.

Building a travel startup? TravHQ wants to hear your story. Pitch it to TravHQ.

The post Luxury Escapes valued at $525m in Ellerston Capital’s 12% stake deal appeared first on TravHQ.

Hotel-booking startup Oyo is raising $1 billion to fund expansion into China and other global regions.

Existing investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners have put in $800 million, with commitments for another $200 million, the company said.

About $600 million of the total will be plowed into China where Oyo began operations only 10 months ago. According to reports, the funding values the startup at $5 billion.

Ritesh Agarwal, founded Oyo five years after travelling around India on a shoestring budget. He discovered wildly unpredictable standards for hotels and guest houses, and decided to start an online service to bring more reliability to the travel experience. In the past two years, Oyo has expanded beyond India into China, Malaysia, Nepal and Britain.

OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal

“With this additional funding, we plan to rapidly scale our business in these countries, while continuing to invest further in technology and talent,” Agarwal said in the statement. “We will also deploy fresh capital to take our unique model that enables small hotel owners to create quality living spaces, global.”

His startup, whose official name is Oravel Stays Pvt, signs on hotel owners and then gets them to upgrade everything from linen, toiletries and bathroom fittings to its specifications. It also equips hotels with staff training and standardized supplies. It then brings them on board its hotel website, and hotel owners pay Oyo a certain percent commission.

“Budget travellers are consistently shortchanged by the lack of trust, quality, and consistency,” said Bejul Somaia, managing director of Lightspeed India, explaining that Oyo can change that dynamic.

At a $5 billion valuation, Oyo would be India’s most-valuable startup after One97 Communications. The domestic hotel industry includes large chains with dependable hospitality experiences at the mid to top end. But the business also includes thousands of unbranded, ramshackle hotels and lodges with broken beds, yellowing linen and stinking bathrooms. Oyo is trying to make hotels easier to find through its site and more predictable as well.

Its criteria are exacting — from the thickness of the mattress to the placement of the light switches to the size of the showerhead in the bathroom. Agarwal has said that he wants the Oyo brand to convey a superior experience.

Oyo began with one hotel in Gurgaon and has grown to 1,25,000 rooms in India, where it says it’s tripling year-over-year in terms of transactions. In China, where it began operations last November, it has expanded to 171 cities with 87,000 rooms. It is now in over 350 cities with 2,11,000 rooms.

The post After announcing UK expansion plans, OYO now raises $1 billion appeared first on TravHQ.

TripFactory, a customized holiday platform, is in talks to raise $100 million in Series-B or second round of institutional funding, a senior executive of the company told Mint India, a leading financial newspaper. TripFactory was co-founded by Vinay Gupta, Amit Aggarwal and Varun Gupta in 2015. Vinay Gupta and Amit Aggarwal had earlier co-found and sold Via.com to Ebix.

“We are looking to raise a $100 million or even more, depending on the kind of investors we can attract,” said Vinay Gupta, co-founder of the online holiday company. Vinay Gupta added that TripFactory is in talks with various funds based out of the Silicon Valley, China and Japan. The online travel marketplace founders will also be engaging with investors who backed their previous startup Via.com.

“We will obviously go back to engage with investors that had shown confidence in us as founders, when we were fundraising for our previous venture via.com, namely Kaalari, Sequoia, Expedia, Priceline, Naspers, Temasek, Premji and new ones like Google, Microsoft, and others,” said Vinay Gupta.

In 2015, the company had raised around $10 million in a Series A Funding from Aarin Capital Partners led by former Infosys Ltd board member T.V. Mohandas Pai and Manipal Group chairman Dr. Ranjan Pai.

“It’s ironic. Travel is an information industry with Zero-IT, it’s just oceans of people everywhere, misinformation in short. All it has seen is a little bit of software automation, more like old car rental companies using software, before Uber came,” said Vinay Gupta.

“We questioned why there is no large holiday company globally. You have to go a few 100 years back and say where did it all start, and then we can innovate. You cannot try making the frying pan better, like the rest, to come up with a microwave. It meant redefining everything; building the world’s First Full stack holiday company. The tech platform we built, like AWS, to sell holidays world over creating the first truly integrated global holiday company with network effects worth 100’s of billions of dollars,” he added.

TripFactory is looking to scale up using an omni-channel; goal is to sell 60k-100k holidays a day. The company is looking to hire around 400 people and set up offices in various cities across the globe. New offices in Dubai, Singapore, Manila, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong later this year as part of its global expansion plans.

The post Holiday platform TripFactory in talks to raise at least $100 million appeared first on TravHQ.

WoVoyage, a travel startup for women, has raised an undisclosed sum of seed funding from Singapore-based investors Shabir Momin and Rohit Nanda, a company statement said. Momin is the co-founder of Zenga Media, an over-the-top digital video platform, while Nanda is a finance professional based in Singapore.

The New Delhi-based startup will use the capital to expand its tech-enabled services and products by developing offerings such as booking services, search and planning platforms, on-demand travel, and recommendation sites, the statement added.

The WoVoyage team

Run by Wovoyage Travel Pvt Ltd, the startup was founded in 2016 by Rashmi Chadha, an entrepreneur who has previously also set up Women Backpackers.

WoVoyage provides risk-free and safe tours for female foreign travelers by teaming them up with women tour guides and helping them design their tours. It offers group departures, recreational activities and concept tours such as photography, rejuvenation, yoga, trekking, cycling, etc. It currently has operations in India and Japan.

“Building a well-established platform, which is a one-stop travel destination, and taking it one notch above every year are my top priorities. We are working on various new developments to make this platform more dynamic and robust,” said Chadha in the statement.

In recent years, as travel has become mainstream and female spaces have moved beyond their negative stereotypes, women-only tour operators have grown strong. From remote camping trips to relaxing at luxurious resorts, these operators provide a plethora of customizable packages to suit different travelling needs.

In an interview to TravHQ last year, Rashmi Chadha spoke about how the big players in the market have just basic packages and deals and don’t do Foreign Independent Tours, which have now become important for customers.

The post Women-centric travel firm WoVoyage raises seed funding appeared first on TravHQ.

Mihuru Pvt. Ltd, a startup that gives micro-loans for air travel through its online platform, has raised seed money worth $150,000 (INR 99.3 lakh) in its first round of external funding that saw participation from entrepreneurs and high-net worth individuals. The company, however, did not name its investors.

According to reports, the funds will be used to enrich the product by building a 360-degree travel fintech platform with multiple credit touch points across the travel journey, thereby addressing the unmet needs of travellers for credit and providing them the ability to split payment for their entire travel across months and different payment methods.

The Mumbai-based startup offers an easy and convenient way for travellers to pay for their flight tickets in EMIs, without needing a credit card or credit scores. Mihuru, which means ‘My Freedom’, aims to help Indians, especially the generation of millennial travellers, travel more often and more freely, without worrying about large upfront costs associated with flight tickets. Helmed by Shruti Mehrotra and her co-founder and advisor, Jonathan Nunez Gonzalez, Mihuru is the first company in India to enable travellers to book their flights with a deposit of just around 20% upfront and pay the balance in installments before they fly.

Mihuru targets young Indians who don’t have access to traditional credit scores or have caps on their credit cards. The startup evaluates potential customers’ digital footprints and does a psycholinguistic assessment before approving credit to them through an online process that it says takes less than five minutes.

The post Travel fintech startup Mihuru raises $150K in seed funding appeared first on TravHQ.