Tourhub raises £1M for adventure booking platform

Tourhub, a booking platform for adventure holidays, has raised £1 million as it looks to onboard more touring operators and expand where it can provide its technology and content.

Waterspring Ventures led the investment with £450,000, partnering on the deal with the Development Bank of Wales, which is investing £300,000 from its Technology Seed Ventures Fund and £250,000 from its Angel Co-Fund.

Tourhub was established just three months before COVID-19. Its strategy for building during the shutdown made an impression on investors, said Sam Huxtable, founder and managing partner at Waterspring Ventures.

“The team astutely spent the pandemic laying the foundations on the tech and operational side of the business, whilst developing existing and new relationships with big and small tour operators around the world,” he said.

Biding their time during the pandemic proved a good decision, Tourhub CEO Seamus Conlon said, because the company was able to deliver all it had promised from the outset.

“In hindsight, having the traveling world come to a halt was an opportunity for us.

We had the time to focus entirely on building our technology platform, as opposed to needing to build and run it at the same time, so we could limit the operational challenges when we did launch,” Conlon said. “Tour operators also weren’t busy, so they were far more open to conversations with us and joining our platform, enabling us to onboard leading operators from around the globe at a much greater rate.”