Not so secret anymore: Secret Escapes offers strong bargains on luxury hotels

Before booking, there is an inspirational impulse: for the traveler, it is becoming more and more difficult to find really relevant offers. The British startup Secret Escapes takes advantage of the ubiquitous sensory overload and organizes handpicked deals for luxury hotels - with resounding success.

With 47 million members in 21 markets the now less secret bargain club focuses on hotels in the four- and five-star segment with discounts of up to 70 percent. Hoteliers can get rid of unsold capacities without cannibalizing their regular full-price business, because the shopping club is subject to registration and therefore not visible in Google search results.

Although the discounts are in many cases not that high, the British are really hitting the mark: according to their own statements, Secret Escapes will mediate more than six million nights this year. Currently the company, in which Google, among others, holds a stake, is growing by around 185 percent per year.

Less is actually more in the opaque jungle of online travel agencies: substantially reduced platforms such as Secret Escapes, HolidayPirates or TravelZoo run editorial departments which select comparatively few offers by hand and present them in particular detail. Here, a selected, focused target group is addressed, which is much more willing to pay than the average and also tends more to impulse buying - a factor that encourages the hoteliers to offer strong discounts in some cases. Secret Escapes hits the "Smart Shopping" nail on the head. In addition, consumers are increasingly combining their trips individually across different providers, instead of booking flights and hotels as a package.

The bottom line is that Secret Escapes is a conventional online travel agency - the only difference being that the customer has to register for free. However, because of the valuable, ready-to-pay target group, Secret Escapes earns much more than its conventional colleagues from Booking.com, Expedia & Co.

Founder and CEO Alex Saint published travel deals on the net in 2005 – the basis for the Secret Escapes founded in 2011. His co-founder Tom Valentine, on the other hand, is a non-sectoral figure and has worked for eBay for three years. In Germany, Secret Escapes acquired the startup JustBook and with it the experienced hotel deal team around Stefan Menden, who is now responsible for the company's second most important market after England.

Secret Escapes has recently raised 111 million US dollars of venture capital, above all from the busy Singaporean state fund Temasek. This means that the company has now collected more than 150 million in at least five rounds - enough for very large marketing envelopes on television as well as strategic acquisitions, according to the company's business environment.

With around 47 million above-average active members, the company, which is only six years old, has become a landmark. But not only the sheer reach to an above-average solvent and travel-affine target group impresses: with the concept of the shopping club, which has long since been declared dead, the startup is able to bring together a high-quality offer with attractive prices and still generate strong earnings.