BERLIN. Campsy announces strategic acquisition of french Camping and Co. to become Europe’s #1 online booking platform for camping vacations, one of the last digital white spots in the travel sector
Campsy will join forces with the French market leader Camping and Co. The new digital platform will be the only offering that combines a pan-European footprint of more than 2.000 handpicked quality campsites in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands with a localized digital solutions for travelers in each of these countries.
“Camping is often at first glance looked at as just a small niche in the travel sector but represents with more than 350 million nights spent per year only on European campsites a booking value of more than EUR 9 billion in Europe alone, a similar size as rental cars or cruise vacations”, explains the group’s CEO Dr. Philipp Hillenbrand who previously worked as Associate Partner for McKinsey & Company. “This is quite significant considering that the camping sector, especially in the large consumer markets like Germany, is still dominated by traditional offline players and therefore one of the last digital white spots.”
“The merger is a next logical step in our buy-and-build strategy towards a global camping travel group where we have successfully integrated the Dutch company “campingfinder.nl”, founded by former booking.com executive Werner Huijboom and the German start-up “get a camp”, founded by Fabian and Sebastian Gartman”.
“For international travelers it is critical to have a simple and easy way to search, find and compare campsites in the regions you want to travel to through a state-of-art digital solution”, comments Guillaume Patrizi who comes from a family that has operated campsites for generations and has worked many years as a director for the French campsite chain Les Castels. The founder of Camping and Co and newly appointed global COO will be responsible for keep shaping the partnership with the European campsites that are offered on the different websites of the Campsy Group. He is convinced that “the merger of Camping and Co with Campsy will combine our long-standing experience in how to partner with the campsites with Campsy’s outstanding technological skills and digital marketing expertise”.
The new group counts on more than 100.000 customers, aspires a booking value of around EUR 20 million for 2017 and projects at current growth rate to become profitable already by end of 2018. The financial investors backing the new company include French VCs Otium and Newfund as well as Europe’s largest incubator Rocket Internet that has helped to build leading companies like Zalando or Hellofresh among many others.
