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- They handed over their reservation: the natives of Google decided to sell the Ostrov service
They handed over their reservation: the natives of Google decided to sell the Ostrov service
The Ostrovok hotel booking service is for sale, Izvestia has learned. The American Emerging Travel Group, founded by Sergey Fage and Kirill Makharinsky from Google, intends to sell one of the leaders of the Russian travel booking market by the end of 2026. Turmashina, which is associated with Igor, the son of billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, as well as Yandex, have already been interested in them, editorial sources say. The amount of the transaction can be discussed and why the creators of the service are getting rid of Russian assets is described in the Izvestia article.
Ostrov can change its owner
The Emerging Travel Group (ETG), founded by former Google employees Sergey Fage and Kirill Makharinsky, intends to sell the Ostrovok online hotel and accommodation booking service by the end of 2026. This was told to Izvestia by the co-owner of a large tour operator working with this resource, an investment banker and a source close to the founders of ETG. A service representative declined to comment. Izvestia was unable to contact Sergey Fage and Kirill Makharinsky. ETG did not respond to the request.
The travel resource was founded in 2010. The company provides users with access to book 2.9 million hotels and other accommodation facilities in Russia and abroad. The service ecosystem also includes a Business Trip Island solution for corporate clients, a B2B platform for agencies and hoteliers, as well as an Extranet system that allows accommodation facilities to directly manage bookings and rates. The monthly website traffic, according to the company's own data, exceeds 23 million, and the number of mobile app installations is 9.5 million.
By the end of 2024, the service's share in the online hotel booking market was 21.5%, according to data from the TravelLine hotel business platform. Yandex Travel has the largest share — 29.2%. There are also three leaders in the top three Bronevik.com (part of the MTC) — 9.4%, according to TravelLine.
The company conducted its first major round of investment in 2011-2012 from Accel Partners, General Catalyst and a number of private investors in the amount of $13.5 million. In March 2013, the company announced it had raised $25 million from the General Catalyst Partners fund, and among the co-investors were Accel Partners, Frontier Ventures and billionaire Yuri Milner. In June 2014, the Vaizra Capital fund, owned by Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev, co-founders of VKontakte, invested about $12 million in Ostrovok. After this transaction, the total amount of attracted investments in the company exceeded $50 million.
The Russian travel service does not disclose consolidated financial statements. According to RAS, by the end of 2024, the total revenue of its two legal entities amounted to 9.7 billion rubles, which is 40% more than a year earlier. The net loss of Hotel Booking LLC amounted to 519.9 million against a profit of 404 million a year earlier. Net profit of the second legal entity (Agentica Travel) It grew 1.8 times year-on-year, to 405.7 million rubles.
ETG is registered in Wilmington, USA. She controls the booking service through the offshore Maletto Investments Limited, sources tell Izvestia. This company is registered in the UAE, according to SPARK-Interfax.
Experts evaluate the value of a business in different ways. According to Ivan Peshkov, head of the M&A department at BGP Capital, taking into account the debt burden, it may amount to 8-10 billion rubles. At the same time, Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline Analytics, talks about an amount of 30-35 billion.
Why do they sell travel services?
The sale is due to the fact that the owners "have not lived in Russia for a long time" and are developing similar projects in foreign markets, said the co-owner of a major tour operator. ETG has several serious projects in the travel-tech segment: the RateHawk booking platform for travel agencies, the ZenHotels hotel booking service for private travelers, and the Roundtrip corporate business travel platform, according to its website. In 2024, the gross amount of transactions through the platforms (gross transaction value, GTV) amounted to about $3.7 billion, ETG reported.
In 2022, the founders of the service divided the business into Russian and foreign, said a source familiar with the company's plans. According to him, the sale attempts were accompanied by a corporate conflict between the beneficiaries and ETG CEO Felix Shpilman due to disagreements about the prospects for the development of this resource.
Ostrov has reached its "ceiling" of growth, becoming one of the leaders of the online booking market, so it is most profitable to implement it now, added an investment banker familiar with the company's plans.
Who is interested in the asset
Turmashina holding (which creates digital products for the tourism market), associated with Igor, the son of billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, showed interest in buying the asset, a source close to the company told Izvestia. But the parties failed to reach an agreement, he said. Turmash did not respond to Izvestia's request.
Among other interested parties to the service, the co-owner of one of their major tour operators calls Yandex. A Yandex Travel representative declined to comment.
The buyer of the platform may be companies that already have assets in the travel-tech market in their portfolio – Wildberries, Ozon, Avito and VK, Ivan Peshkov believes. According to him, the Russian market has been redistributed between domestic companies after the departure of foreign Booking and Airbnb. Ostrovok is also of interest to ecosystem players such as MTS Travel and T–Bank, Mikhail Burmistrov believes.
By the end of 2025, the tourist housing rental market will amount to about 1.3 trillion rubles, of which 650 billion rubles will be in the online booking segment, predicts Artem Kromochkin, director of the Avito Travel service. At the same time, the sphere of this market, according to him, is still "far from saturation." Technological transformation and growing consumer demand open up prospects for significant growth and development for online services, the expert believes.
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