Based in Spain, eDreams is an online travel company that bought out Opodo and Go Voyages before floating in 2013.
The market leaders in France (Go Voyages) and Germany (Priceline) capture only a bit more then one-tenth of the online-travel market in their respective countries.
We've got Go Voyages, who has apparently expressed an interested in acquiring Opodo, and Axa also recently made an investment in Bravofly.
Each company — eDreams of Spain, Opodo of Britain and GO Voyages of France — had a strong market share in specific areas in Europe, but now cover all 27 countries in the region.
AXA won the upper hand in the bidding war for Go Voyages, a French travel website, while Permira snapped up eDreams, a Barcelona-based travel website that AXA also coveted.
This makes the strength of a travel website's brand even more important, as well as the traffic generated by price-checking travellers, which explains why AXA and Permira will keep all three brands if they succeed in buying Opodo as well as the GDS of either Amadeus, which Opodo and eDreams are currently using, or Worldspan, which is providing Go Voyages' travel technology.
Now the two private-equity firms have joined forces in a takeover bid for Opodo, Europe's biggest travel website.With their recently formed alliance AXA and Permira are hoping to merge Opodo with Go Voyages and eDreams to create a proper European rival to Orbitz and Expedia, two American firms which are the market leaders.
Renaissance man owns French tour operator Go Voyages, yacht builder Royal Van Lent; has a stake in French retailer Carrefour.
Via his investment arm, Groupe Arnault, owns French tour operator Go Voyages and a stake in French retail chain Carrefour.
Renaissance man also owns yacht builder Royal Van Lent, a hotel in Courchevel; has stakes in French retailer Carrefour and French tour operator Go Voyages.
"Once I began to see that, I said, this is the way I want to go". That voyage took him into computer science, electrical engineering, courses in artificial intelligence, philosophy, religion and up to the brink of mysticism.
