IPOs often get tongues wagging in the industry but it’s the recent lack thereof that has upped the ante, with some putting a halt on plans amidst the Trump Tariffs that are circling like metaphorical piranhas threatening to gobble everything up.
With GetYourGuide and Stripe rumoured to be among those to go public this year, heads turned when the first to be listed was HBX Group.
The parent company of Hotelbeds, Bedsonline and Roiback, listed on the Spanish stock markets in January this year.
Since then, it’s raised €725 million within a week, valuing the company at €2.84 billion.
At its recent MarketHub Europe event, the emphasis on the future for the company, its partners and its ecosystem, was felt. Its agenda even had a session with Carla Stent, one of its board members, on forces driving growth with the IPO playing a heavy part in that.
The team had been plugging away behind the scenes for more than a year in order to get the firm to a place where it was ready to be listed, “because what you see at the end is not all the preparation work and the building of these capabilities in the run up to that” says Paula Felstead, CIO of HBX Group.
That takes it back to before it announced the rebrand to HBX Group in October 2023.
Moves necessary involved data, tech stack and operational improvements. The improvements to both the core tech stack and its data sees up to seven billion searches handled by the platform (up from 6.2 billion searches at the time of its MarketHub Europe event).
The whole process is said to have been a critical milestone, according to Xabi Zabala, chief operating officer of HBX Group, and one that has given the business confidence to from the market and investors to start the next phase of its journey as a company.
HBX Group’s raison d’être for the past 18 months finally wrapped up, sees its sights set firmly on other things.
Focus locked in, the firm plans to scale its partnerships that it has nurtured alongside the IPO, including the acquisition of Civitfun and creation of The Luxurist.
These initiatives, born out of recognising where the brand is “isn´t as strong” says Felstead, will mean it will grow its capabilities on a global basis for connectivity and reliability for its customers.
It is expected that bigger contributions in revenue will be reaped from these partnerships in the next one to two years but scaling an already huge company, is no easy feat.
It plans to simultaneously build on its technological transformation foundation from the past year to secure further growth and though its CIO Paula Felstead doesn’t believe there will be a travel super app of the future, the business is investing its efforts in the connected trip with hyperconnectivity, enhanced safety and security, unified platforms, seamless multimodal and customer support that is anytime, anywhere.
It’s in this that Civitfun and The Luxurist will play a part, in tandem with the likes of Mastercard and AWS to realise it’s vision.
The new outlook sees the business become “ecosystem minded”, not just accommodation minded, although this is still the subsector of travel that is the company’s biggest business.
It’s with this renewed future that its chief growth officer, Mark Antipof, shares how why the future is bright for its partners.
“You leverage scale, you leverage technology, and you leverage the expertise that we have and the people we have… and it’s all really good,” he says.
It’s the ecosystem mentality that has led it to the connect trip. Javier Cabrerizo, chief strategy and transformation officer, calls the connected trip the ability to “serve all of the travel needs of consumers”.
He says it’s simply not there, just yet, anyway. “This is something that is a big transformation for the industry.”
“One of the pain points that all travellers have is they buy in silos… and that’s the connection we’re putting in place so all of the products are at the hands of the distributors and adding next-gen services like FinTech.”
“We are committed, and we continue to be committed to the role of taking away that friction of travel,” he says.
“It just takes a bit of time to change the industry in such a way.”
“And that’s why we’re doubling down on the partnerships now, we cannot do it in isolation,” adds Carlos Muñoz, chief commercial officer.
Paving the way for all its future work though, is data. Felstead says it will continue to play a part of its focus as the “investment is foundational” for its COO, Xabi Zabala, wants to achieve for his customer service.
He believes we are seeing, in a world that becomes more technological and more automated, it’s “actually the experience and the human touch that makes the difference”, so he says the team are working to ensure they get that balance right between automation and human care.
Antipof summarises HBX Group’s future as: “For us, it’s all about sustainability, growth and return to our stakeholders.”
