Three months after throwing in the towel due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trip Ninja has been thrown a lifeline by Australia-based Webjet.
Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed for multi-city flight search tech provider but the management team headed by CEO Andres Collart will still be involved in the business.
It is understood that Webjet were alerted to the fate of Trip Ninja in a PhocusWire article in September this year and moved to enquire about buying the company.
Canada-based Trip Ninja was founded in 2014 and had raised only a modest $1 million in funding prior to the Webjet deal.
Webjet is a publicly listed group of businesses, including the hotel wholesale business WebBeds and Webjet online travel agency.
CEO John Guscic says: "We see significant growth opportunities for the Webjet OTA business as international travel starts to return.
"Traditionally, in a multi-stop trip, we were only able to combine airfares from carriers with codeshare agreements, however the Trip Ninja technology now gives us the ability to create complex itineraries combining non-aligned carriers in order to provide our customers the best price."
Speaking to PhocusWire in September this year, Collart said: "We have learned a lot over the last five years of running Trip Ninja. I think the biggest lesson was around pain. Ultimately Trip Ninja offered a massive opportunity for multi-destination flights - making lots of money for OTAs and retail agencies. However, opportunities don’t command budgets or time as much as pain does. We routinely contended with sales cycles upwards of 8 months for even mid-sized OTAs.
"Just prior to the pandemic, we focused more strongly on retail agencies and TMCs. For retail agencies and TMCs it’s not an opportunity, it’s a pain. The time required to manually create itineraries is a significant and costly challenge."
* Check this interview with Guscic, recorded for the How I Got Here podcast in May 2021.
How I Got Here, episode 64 - John Guscic of Webjet