Which interactive travel companies are about to go public? Any chief executive in his right mind must be mulling an IPO right about now. Any venture capitalist with half a brain must be prodding that same CEO to sign off on his Form S-1. And employees are on the bandwagon, too, eager for their hard-earned options to vest and turn them into instant millionaires.
The “.com” craze is far from over.
Take the reported — but as yet unconfirmed — sale of Biztravel.com last week to a group of investors led by Rosenbluth International. The transaction is believed to be one piece of a larger scheme that, when everything is in place, will result in a Biztravel IPO or in a Rosenbluth stock offering. One informed source has even speculated that the SEC paperwork is ready to go, pending a final signature on the deal.
Even as the drama plays itself out, another interactive travel company across the country is on the verge of a public stock offering. Travelscape.com, a Las Vegas vacation sales company, expects to sell about $50 million in stock within the coming days. Never mind that the enterprise lost a total of $5.4 million in the first quarter of this year. This is the Internet, after all.
Then there are the perennial almost-public companies from which we may yet see some action before year’s end. Trip.com (for which I write another column but, truth be told, am not privy to any insider information) hooked up with investor Galileo earlier this year. It would seem silly for the booking site not to plan a stock offering-and soon-after successfully relaunching its IntelliTrip application. Trip.com’s new, spiffier URL and widely licensed content make mincemeat of once-formidable competitor Biztravel, whose saving grace is a wickedly clever travel column written by Joe Brancatelli. Likewise, Microsoft’s Expedia.com now seems to be merely drifting.
The newly renamed GetThere.com, which was born as Internet Travel Network, is also a shoo-in for an IPO, even though it’s kept such a low profile lately you wonder if it still exists. Going public appears to be part of the plan after a series of management shakeups dented the company’s credibility and contributed to pushing back a stock sale. (A dip in the market last fall didn’t help, either.) But GetThere investors such as United Airlines aren’t exactly known for their patience. Now that the dust has settled from last year’s trouble, and now that the company is looking beyond travel as a sole source of revenue, perhaps the time is right for GetThere to show us the Red Herring.
Going public is a major decision and a stressful process, from the filing to the quiet period to pricing the darned stock. But in this instance, I think not going public can be an even more stressful proposition. What if the market dries up for Internet-related IPOs?
There are some signs out there that we’re at the start of a “down” cycle. If things keep heading south, will investors bail out, the way they did with Biztravel? Will they stick with it, but insist on changes, like at GetThere? Will they bring in new investors? I think the last half of this year will be telling. Interactive travel companies may be forced into making decisions that they don’t want to make. Who’s going public? Eventually, all of us probably will be.
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