Europe’s largest tour operator, TUI Travel Accommodation & Destinations, has acquired Brazil’s fourth largest hotel-only online travel company, MalaPronta.com.
With this move, the UK-listed TUI (with ties to the German-owned, €3 billion euro Touristik Union International) deepens its consumer Brazil coverage, supplementing its South American wholesaler site Hotelbeds.
It also adds to its portfolio of well established OTAs: AsiaRooms.com , a market leader among OTAs (with an emphasis on the Far East), and LateRooms.com, the half-billion-euro annual sales generator focused on Europe.
Founded in 2004, MalaPronta manages more than 1,200 partner hotels in about 200 Brazilian locations. Its gross assets were BRL 1.4 million $687,000 as of the end of last year.
MalaPronta, which means “pack your bags” in Portuguese, claims a 117% compound annual revenue growth on average in the past 7 years. In 2011 it sold 130,000 room nights.
Competitors include Brazil’s leading OTA Submarino Viagens (with about 1.7 million visitors a month), Hotel Urbano, and Decolar. See Tnooz’s August list of top Brazil travel sites.
A hint of future plans for TUI Travel
Chris Morris, Managing Director of the accommodation OTA businesses for TUI Travel A&D says:
“MalaPronta is an established business with great brand memorability and SEO positioning. It is an excellent fit with LateRooms.com and AsiaRooms.com and our strategy to focus on the opportunities in the emerging markets.”
As context, Morris was part of the private equity team that acquired, built, and exited LateRooms.com for 6x entry enterprise value within 2 years and then became the LateRooms CEO.In February, Peter Long, CEO of TUI, told reporters that it plans to focus on Brazil, Russia, India, and China for future expansion, given that these nations are in a league of their own when it comes to entrepreneurial verve.
After a changeover in executive leadership this fall and a possible change in ownership structure, TUI Travel will announce its roadmap for growth on 4 December.
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About Sean O'Neill
130,000 room nights in 2011
divide by 365 days
divide by length of stay of 3 nights
equals…
less than 120 bookings per day in 2011
Hi, Joe,
Thanks for your comment. I agree with your math.
This is a case of “buying low.” The purchase price was also low, as noted in the article.
Adoption of the Internet is rapidly spreading in Brazil, and this is a bet that this particular platform has a lot of room to grow.
Best,
Sean
This is a joke news. Laterooms is making people redundant in it’s Manchester offices. It’s sad that on one TUI is laying people off while even if it’s growing in double digits and on other it’s spending money to buy more rubbish like asiarooms.com.
Crazy…. well as long as they have people like andrew, you will see these joker news every now and then.