Certares' Internova: Behind Its Strategy for Luxury Travel Agencies

27.10.2023 - 22:19 / skift.com / Greg Ohara / Dawit Habtemariam / Scott Dunn

Internova Travel Group, a network of travel agencies owned by private equity firm Certares, plans to expand its investments in the luxury space. That will help give its more than 100,000 travel advisors more boutique hotel offerings and packages to offer customers. 

“We’ll continue to double down on the luxury space,” said J.D. O’Hara, CEO of Internova — a network of over 6,000 agencies.

The luxury travel advisor space has several players, including Virtuoso, Amex’s Ovation, Scott Dunn, Abercrombie & Kent, Tully Luxury Travel, and Black Tomato.

It was highly unusual for a private equity firm to invest in the luxury travel agency sector when Certares acquired Internova in early 2020.

Certares, led by O’Hara’s brother Greg O’Hara, is a heavy investor in travel, holding stakes in companies that include Hertz, American Express Global Business Travel, Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, LATAM Airlines Group, AmaWaterways, Voyageurs du Monde, Avoya, G Adventures, AHI Travel, and roughly a dozen hotels. Its broad travel holdings give it insights across categories, and that’s why industry observers are curious about its moves with Internova.

In an interview this week at Global Travel Collection’s Elevate Conference in New York City, O’Hara talks about Internova’s investment plans, how cruising is booming, an update on its recent acquisitions, the state of travel agencies in 2023, and why it launched a print magazine in a digital-first era.

Skift: How big is your network now compared to 2019? 

O’Hara: So what we’ve seen, and this is kind of a normal course, we’ve seen fewer agencies in the U.S. market, but the average agency is quite a bit bigger.

So I don’t know how many years ago, 20 years ago, let’s say, there were 30,000 agencies. The last time I checked, there were slightly over 10,000.

On average, they’re significantly larger than before. There’s been a lot of consolidation, a lot of retirement. 

Our network is 6,000 agencies that represent in total under our umbrella, somewhere over 100,000 travel advisors. That’s global. We’ve also now got an international network on the corporate side. If we count all of those and all the independent contractors of all the agencies under our umbrella, we have over a hundred thousand.

Where two agencies made a dollar in the past, now you’re seeing one agency making $2 — and often more.

Actually this is a growing industry, not shrinking.

We’ve been on a little bit of an acquisition hiatus. But when we get back to that, it’s just easier to buy bigger agencies than smaller ones to get the same outcome.

Skift: Since the pandemic’s start, you’ve done strategic mergers and acquisitions to expand your reach, like Protravel and Tzell Travel Group. What have those