Yesterday, iTrip executives announced to employees that a majority stake in the company has been acquired by Vacation Brands, the private equity funded vacation rental industry rollup led by Greater Sum Ventures (GSV).
Vacation Brands will add iTrip’s vacation rental management franchise model to the list of vacation rental industry companies it has already purchased, which includes property management software companies (Streamline, VRM, and LiveRez), web development and marketing companies (Bluetent and Bizcor), and travel insurance provider Rental Guardian.
According to its website, Nashville-based iTrip provides full-service vacation rental management services to over 2,350 vacation properties in 21 states through 50+ franchise locations and is GSV’s first property management (PM) addition to its Vacation Brands rollup.
The acquisition puts GSV’s Vacation Brands in direct competition with its core PM client base and appears to be a departure from the business-to-business models GSV created with Ministry Brands and Property Brands, which according to a release is “a suite of best-in-class SaaS solutions that includes accounting, CRM, rent payment processing, background screening, and renters insurance software products.”
We reached out to iTrip and have not yet received a comment.
Will be interesting to see how this fares with people using their PMS products.