This report strikes a balance between analyzing funding to startups and examining recent funding raised by important players in travel tech regardless of their age. Thus, it features analysis of technology-oriented travel companies founded any time in the past three decades, and it measures funding raised by these companies over the past decade – specifically between the beginning of 2014 and the third quarter of 2024 (3Q24).
Changes to the data and methodology:
*In mid-2024, Phocuswright enhanced its data collection processes and added thousands of companies to the database that were not included previously. This nearly doubled the number of companies in this analysis compared to previous reports. This annual report has historically been titled The State of Travel Startups and analyzed startups founded within a certain date range (e.g., the past five or 10 years). In 2023, given that well-established companies were among the main entities raising money, we expanded the range to include companies founded at any time in the past three decades, and titled the report as The State of Travel Funding. This year, we switched the emphasis back to startups, but retained the expanded founded date range.
To avoid skewing the analysis, companies that have raised over $4 billion or only operate tangentially in travel (specifically, autonomous vehicle companies) were excluded from the analyzed dataset unless otherwise specified. As a result, 35 companies (e.g., Uber, Didi, Airbnb, Cruise, Waymo), which have raised $117.3 billion, are excluded.
**Funding includes publicly disclosed amounts of venture capital, private equity, crowdfunding, debt and other types of traditional funding rounds. Dollar amounts associated with IPOs, acquisitions, mergers and post-IPO investments were excluded from the analyzed dataset.
