Travelport Worldwide Limited has acquired Mobile Travel Technologies (MTT), a private company based in Dublin, Ireland.
Its clients include some of travel’s most progressive companies such as easyJet, Singapore Airlines, Saudia, BCD Travel, Capita Travel and Events and the LATAM Airlines Group.
MTT works with its clients to create mobile applications and intelligent mobile services that deliver a highly customer-centric experience. With its mobile travel platform and product set, it can enable travel companies to quickly launch high-end, engaging mobile services in a cost effective manner.
Services include mobile search, booking and check-in as well as products such as MTT Engage, which provides real-time, personalised messages and offers to the traveller, and MTT Concierge Live, which delivers a “day of travel” experience via a traveller’s mobile device including live, contextual travel updates and airport guidance. As well as receiving many industry accolades, MTT was recently featured in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Travel and Hospitality, 2015” report.
Gordon Wilson, Travelport’s president and CEO, commented: “It is a natural extension of Travelport’s strategy of redefining travel commerce to have acquired, what we believe to be, the largest and most successful company focused on delivering sophisticated mobile services and apps to the travel industry. Adding MTT as an expanded capability to our existing travel commerce platform extends our reach further, and at the higher value add end of the service spectrum for our airline, hotel, travel management company and travel agency clients.
“At the same time, MTT will benefit from the network effect of Travelport in terms of infrastructure, our relationships with additional prospective clients and access to our industry leading content.
“We will run MTT as a wholly owned subsidiary of Travelport, retaining existing CEO, Gerry Samuels, along with his senior team, so that they can maintain their singular focus on the mobile sector and the deep seated customer relationships they build.”
Travelport’s acquisition of MTT follows other recent investments it has made as part of its ongoing strategy to redefine travel commerce, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing digital economy.
These investments include Travel IT, a next generation German tour operator distribution system; Hotelzon, a hotel distribution company focused on enabling independent hotels to take part in the online corporate travel economy and Locomote, an Australian based corporate travel applications development company.
Travelport has also invested in, and expanded, eNett, a pioneering B2B electronic payments company which now operates in 47 countries around the world and continues to grow rapidly.
Travelport has also invested organically to enable both low cost and network carriers to display and sell their full range of products and offers through its Travel Commerce Platform on a unique and fully integrated basis, and to offer an industry leading portfolio of individual hotel properties (650,000) that are fully bookable in real time.
The acquisition was funded from Travelport’s cash resources. Travelport expects the acquisition to be neutral for its financial performance in 2015 and accretive in future years.