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Booking Holding has announced the acquisition of the ETraveli Group, which specializes in the online sale of airline tickets. Since 2017, the company, which is based in Sweden, has been owned by the investment fund CVC Capital Partners. The transaction amount amounted to 1.63 billion euros.
This is the second major acquisition of Booking Holdings in November alone. About two weeks ago, the company announced the purchase of a large American hotel distributor Getaroom. The transaction value was $1.6 billion.
The companies already have quite a rich history of cooperation. Booking.com, a member of Booking Holding, entered into a partnership agreement with ETraveli on the sale of air tickets on its own site back in October 2019.

In the third quarter of this 2021, the total volume of airline tickets increased by 131% compared to the same quarter of 2019. According to Glenn Vogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, such explosive growth is largely due to the expansion of the ticket sales service, which is currently available in 27 countries.
"We continue to expand a reliable platform for flights... We see that more than 25% of the customers who have booked tickets for the flight are completely new customers. Thanks to them, we are seeing an encouraging increase in the number of housing bookings. However, there is still a lot of work to be done to further optimize cross-selling opportunities," Vogel said in a telephone conversation with analysts about Booking's quarterly report on November 3, 2021, Phocuswire reports.

Booking Holdings is positioning this acquisition of ETraveli Group as part of "ongoing work to create a seamless global flight offering." The group includes such brands as Gotogate, Flygresor, Seat24, Mytrip, provider of virtual interline technologies TripStack and Flight Network.
Buying a business selling airline tickets will be another step for Booking Holding towards creating a universal platform for the formation of dynamic travel packages, experts say.
"As international air travel recovers from the impact of the pandemic, we hope to strengthen our existing relationship with Etraveli Group in order to simplify and simplify the travel booking process to support our partners and customers," Booking Holding management said in a comment on the deal.

At the same time, ETraveli Group will continue to operate under its own brand, will retain its headquarters in Sweden, as well as the entire existing organizational structure with more than 20 divisions in Greece, Canada, India, Argentina and other countries.
Over the past five years, ETraveli Group has changed ownership several times. In 2015, it was sold by the investment company Segluah to the German media group ProSiebenSat.1. Just a year and a half later, the German holding company sold it to CVC for 508 million euros.
In its latest report, Booking Holdings reported an increase in revenue in the third quarter of 2021 to $ 4.7 billion. This is only slightly lower than the revenue in the same period of 2019 ($ 5 billion).