Chinese travel giant Ctrip, the parent company of Skyscanner, has acquired Trip.com, the Silicon Valley-based travel planning and local discovery app and site.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2010 in Menlo Park, California, Trip.com was formerly called Gogobot and has raised US$39 million dollars in total funding. Among the investors are Expedia’s HomeAway, Battery Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.
The acquisition will allow global travel search site Skyscanner to leverage select Trip.com capabilities under its own platform.
The planning site uses a combination of 20 “Tribes”, as well as predictive intelligence that takes into account your location, the weather and more to offer personalised recommendations for where to stay, eat and play in more than 60,000 destinations.
This intelligence is layered on top of rich user-generated content from Trip.com’s community, including more than 1.5 million reviews and five million photos of hotels, restaurants and things to do around the world.
Trip.com uses a combination of 20 “Tribes” and predictive intelligence to recommend the best travel experience
Skyscanner said the technology, community and content behind Trip.com would enable it to serve the traveller needs from choosing where to travel to finding the best deals to get users to their destinations.
“Our aim has always been to make travel search as simple as possible, providing travellers everything they need in one single place. Adding Trip.com’s content to Skyscanner’s offering represents the next step towards that goal,” said Skyscanner chief technology officer, Bryan Dove.
Travis Katz, Trip.com’s co-founder and CEO, added that Skyscanner share his company’s “focus on mobile and passion for empowering people to have amazing travel experiences”, and they would work together to offer “a single resource to travellers around the world that meets all their travel needs.”
Trip.com’s team of 30 will continue to operate from their current office locations, alongside Katz and co-founder Ori Zaltzman.
• Featured image credit: Soft_Light/iStock-GettyImages
