The type of overseas trip where you need multiple hotels, flights, activities, transfers, transport methods and guides has traditionally been undertaken by travel agents. Since there’s no real-time pricing for such complex offerings, travelers have few other options. Spanish startup Exoticca set out to crack that nut and has now raised a €60 million Series D round led by Quadrille Capital.
The market for multi-day tour packages is very large, but it’s one of the last areas of the travel industry to be digitized. Exoticca’s platform connects flights, hotels, meals, transfers, transportation and local companies. This makes it simpler to book these more complex packages, as well as reduces costs by as much as 30%, the company claims.
Exoticca also claims to have more than doubled its sales year-over-year since 2015, and now operates in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Colombia through a network of travel and non-travel online and offline partners.
“The package tour was invented by Thomas Cook two centuries ago and has really not evolved in that time,” said Exoticca CEO Pere Vallès. “We’re bringing a model that is more digital, that allows us to sell these types of products online, that is more flexible, but has also some big advantages when it comes to cost and price.”
Exottica competes to some extent with Tourlane, a planning and booking platform that helps travelers research and buy multi-day tours online. Tourlane has raised $101 million to date.
However, Vallès said that Exottica doesn’t “see them as competitors. They have a different model, which is more based on a marketplace. They don’t offer real-time pricing.”
His company is focused on “value for money,” Vallès said. “And this leads us to a customer that is middle class and upper middle class.” He added that 75% of Exottica’s business is in the U.S. and Canada, “so it’s Americans and Canadians traveling to the 70 destinations that we offer,” from the company’s headquarters in Barcelona.
He said the objective is to expand into Latin America, the Middle East, India and China.
In a statement, Alejandra Duran Gil, Partner at Quadrille Capital, said: “Exoticca’s strong financial foundation and the team’s exceptional execution are at the heart of our investment thesis.”
Also participating in this round were new investors including All Iron and ICF and existing investors 14W, Mangrove, Bonsai, Sabadell and Aldea.