Miami investor goes from taking on Trump to disrupting the global travel industry
The owner of Donald Trump’s former luxury hotel in Panama, who successfully evicted the Trump Organization from the property in 2018, has announced a major new investment in an online travel technology platform that seeks to disrupt the hotel and tourism industry in even bigger ways.
While Trump has since continued his losing streak, suffering a presidential election defeat to Joe Biden in November 2020, Orestes Fintiklis, founder of Ithaca Capital, a hospitality and travel private equity investment firm, is now set to take public a Silicon Valley marketplace and technology platform, known as Mondee, that hopes to revolutionize the $1 trillion travel market provide a new solution for gig workers in the post-pandemic economy.
The Panama deal was quite a coup for Ithaca, and helped put the boutique firm on the map with widespread media coverage over its skillful humiliation of the much-vaunted Trump Organization, famous for its founder’s supposed talent for knowing the ‘art of the deal.’
Ithaca owns several hotel in Latin America, including Panamá and Colombia and is still in litigation with Trump in Panama, where his former hotel is now being successfully operated by JW Marriott as one of the most popular luxury destinations in Panama.
“We chose to partner with ITHAX specifically because their team has an enviable record of successful business transactions, as well as possesses true expertise in the travel and leisure markets," said Mondee’s CEO, Prasad Gundumogula.
The Trump comparisons don’t end there. The Mondee deal is valued at about $1 billion and is expected to close in the first half of 2022, is being executed via a SPAC, a special financial acquisition mechanism which Trump is also using to launch his new media company, TMTG.
Unlike Trump’s controversial media company, which has raised plenty of investor capital but has not yet launched itself in the conservative media market, Mondee is an existing company with a 10-year history of strong revenues, historical profitability and impressive growth with over $3 billion in sales.
The new public company a partnership between Mondee and ITHAX Acquisition Corp, an offshoot of Ithaca, is launching with $300 million in cash from the SPAC, with investors including Morgan Stanley, and major private equity funds. ITHAX Acquisition Corp. is a strategic collaboration between Ithaca and AXIA Ventures Group, a real estate and hospitality firm with decades of experience developing and managing hotels and resorts.
"Mondee's vision is to transform the entire travel industry,” Gundumogula, said in a statement.
Mondee originally targeted the private airfare market and has since expanded to hotel and cars, cruise and tour offerings to create what it calls an Uber-like platform to help consumers bypass the avalanche of online travel data to get the best deals, connecting over 500 airlines and more than 50,000 gig and remote travel agents, according to a company presentation. “Just as there is now an Uber for transportation and a Netflix for entertainment, Mondee is quickly becoming a de-facto modern world travel marketplace,” it states.
“In this case you don’t need a car, you just need a computer or a smart phone,” said Fintiklis, CEO of ITHAX and founder of Ithaca Capital Partners.
It also seeks to address travel trends further accelerated by the covid-19 pandemic, allowing airlines to find a market for excess capacity resulting from shrinking business travel budgets. “This business model is ideally suited to the new normal which has been disrupted by covid and is already in sync with current travel market trends,” he added.