Tripsta

» see tripsta.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

When you buy a plane ticket through an agency, the airline does not get your money that day. It goes into a clearing system that settles weeks later, which means for a stretch of time the agency is sitting on a fare that belongs to somebody else. I never thought about that layer until I read about a company falling through it. Tripsta is what it looks like when the float runs out.

The business started in Athens in 2005 as travelplanet24, built by Philipp Brinkmann and Kristof Keim. Poland was the first foreign market in 2010, the same year Tripsta S.A. was set up as the holding company for everything that came next. By 2015 the group was selling in more than 45 countries in over 34 languages.

In March 2015 it bought airtickets, a Greek rival, and the combined operation got described in the local press as the largest ecommerce company in Greece. The European Investment Fund had put 3.5 million euros of growth money in the year before that. By 2017 more than a million customers had bought something, and gross bookings had passed 500 million euros.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Selling flights online is a thin business. The agency takes a few euros off a ticket that costs a few hundred, so the only way the model works is by pushing enormous volume through a small margin. Tripsta was good at that part. Greek travelers who had spent the 2000s calling agencies got a website that compared everything and charged less than the airline's own booking fee.

What nobody outside the industry sees is what that volume does to the balance sheet. Every ticket sold sits in IATA's Billing Settlement Plan before it reaches the carrier. Grow fast enough and the amount of other people's money in transit through your accounts gets very large, very quickly. In the spring of 2018 Tripsta was handling 35 percent of all Greek sales running through that system, and growing 150 percent against the year before.

~ the fall ~

Early in June 2018, IATA restricted the company to credit card sales only. That is the industry equivalent of a bank pulling an overdraft, and it happens when the settlement account has stopped looking safe. A repayment plan was negotiated to run through the end of 2020, which tells you roughly how deep the hole already was.

Airlines started withdrawing ticketing authority one by one. Each withdrawal cut off another slice of revenue, and the revenue was the only thing that could have funded the repayment. Tripsta blamed its GDS partner Travelport and took legal action. Travelport denied everything. The argument is still the part of the story that Greek travel people bring up first, and it did not change what happened next.

~ the day it died ~

On 28 June 2018 the company announced it was suspending the issue of new airline tickets, citing a massive liquidity problem that made it impossible to keep functioning properly. The number underneath that sentence was around 69 million euros owed to the settlement plan for May sales alone. One month.

Roughly 140 people were dismissed the following day, with about 40 kept on to handle refunds and reissues for customers holding tickets that airlines were no longer honoring. Plenty of those customers never got anything back. The statement said the websites would keep working properly, which was true in the narrow sense that they loaded. Airtickets.gr came back as a metasearch engine that sends you somewhere else to pay. Travelplanet24 was reduced to selling ferry tickets. The company that had been holding everyone's money never traded again.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »