Travolution ConnectS 2026: Specialists and community prompt travel investors to reassess winning

Biggest movers and shakers were revealed alongside important strategy considerations

Last week’s Travolution Connects event closed with an investor-focused panel and keynote, concluding that “the smart money” is avoiding consumer-facing businesses which are either too small to succeed on razor-thin margins or too big to offer a niche, premium service.

Susie Stanford from Growth Partner, a UK-based firm investing in consumer-facing businesses, said: “What's challenging is the space in the middle, where you're neither a data-led super-aggregator, nor are you kind of authentic community”.

Fellow panellist Morgann Lesné from Cambon Partners described the middle as “the danger zone.” He explained: “You can stay in the danger zone for years and years and years without necessarily dying. 

"We see a lot of companies like this, plateauing, and it can last for years like that. So we’re always interested in stepping back and watching what's the growth trend of a business”.

Both agreed that growth is not correlated with size. Stanford explained she is interested in investing in “single discipline specialists” such as home swaps, camping aggregators, or, getting specific, one of her recent investments, Secret Food Tours. 

“Can these be 100 billion businesses? Probably not. But the unit economics of them, in terms of how you build a 100 million EBITDA business, you don't have to be as big for that to be the case”.

Lesné also talked up single discipline specialists, including the home swap sector. He revealed that he was “looking very closely at” a business which provides a subscription-based marketplace for travelers who would like to exchange homes. 

“It's already worth half a billion but I wouldn't be surprised to see that passing a billion valuation in the coming three, four years, because I don't see that trend being stopped by anything.”

Home swap is part of a trend that aligns with a desire among travelers to feel part of a community, and this is a wider focus for Lesné. 

“The winners will be the people who are able to address communities,” he said, “because humanity has a sense of belonging to something, belonging to a community.”

Winners are also in it for the long run, he said, with community-based travel specialists ideally positioned to build sustainable growth over time. 

“If you win for two years, you don’t have a business at the end of it. The losers will be the people who expect to do a short trip into entrepreneurship and who aren’t resilient or brave.”

Stanford also offered her definition of winning, which plays to the strengths of niche, experience-led brands. “A crude measure we came up with only a few weeks ago was ‘how many of your customers are you having to buy and rebuy?’ And when I say buy, it's either paying through Google search or heavily discounting. You want a business where the customer is actively choosing to come back to the brand, time and time again, willingly paying the full sticker price, even if they could probably component part it together themselves independently. Whether you're a small business or a large business, that's sustainable.”

So what of the scale businesses? “Bundle aggregators will continue to be large,” Stanford said, “and if you're thinking about a 10 billion pound plus travel company, it's got to be one of those because of the scale required to do this. 

£The margins are skinny but these are tech-led, data-rich propositions…It's a bit like Amazon  - we purchase through Amazon, we don't always love it, but it's a kind of highly functional customer journey.”

The bundle aggregators and scale players were in focus in the closing keynote featuring Roopak Pati, an investment banker with Oppenheimer & Co. 

He used the example of Expedia, where he spent a few years in corporate development in the 2010s, “acquiring businesses that are on the B2B side of things, because if you're going to compete, you need to be able to enable AI platforms with supply”.

He namechecked car rental, ground transport and insurance aggregator CarTrawler and activities platform Tiqets, but noted that the most interesting move from Expedia was its tie-up with Uber, allowing Uber users to book Expedia hotel inventory through the Uber app.

“I think that was a pretty major move, if you think about what that does that do to travel more broadly” he said. 

“There's a lot of talk about connected trip, but most people don't mean the food you order to your hotel room as part of that connected trip. Now we have someone who knows what I order most days, where I go, what I like to do, moving into hotels. I mean, that level of knowledge about the consumer is remarkable and no one else has that”.

Pati’s reference to Dublin-based CarTrawler and Amsterdam-based Tiqets inadvertently confirmed something Lesné said in his panel, talking up a positive future for the European travel sector. 

“We have great technology companies, great content companies,” he said.

Similarly, Stanford was also upbeat. “I'm a specialist investor in the consumer space and I've lived with travel investments through every disruption over the last 15 years and there are always disruptions. But if I compare travel to other pockets within consumer – apparel, hospitality, others - travel feels better by comparison”.