Airbnb leads a $58M Series C in WeRoad and hires its CEO to run hotels

Airbnb led a $58M Series C in WeRoad, a Milan-based group-adventure-travel platform, taking a 10% stake and a board seat. Andrea D’Amico, WeRoad’s CEO since 2022, left to lead Airbnb’s hotels division. The deal provides Airbnb minority exposure to group tours and an experienced operator to support its hotels push. D’Amico previously spent 18 years at Booking.com overseeing hotel business across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. WeRoad runs multi-day organized tours with curated guides, targeting millennial and younger travelers. The Series C follows a €18M Series B in late 2023 and is earmarked for US expansion, where competition is stronger from established tour operators and travel networks.

"Airbnb has led a $58m Series C in WeRoad, the Milan-based group-adventure-travel platform, taking a 10% stake and a board seat as part of the deal. Andrea D'Amico, the company's chief executive since 2022, is simultaneously leaving WeRoad to lead Airbnb's hotels division. The funding round was reported on Wednesday by TechCrunch and Skift."

"Backing WeRoad and hiring its CEO simultaneously is a tighter form of integration that gets Airbnb both a minority position in the group-tour category and a senior operator with two decades of Booking.com EMEA hotel experience to run its own hotels push. D'Amico, before joining WeRoad in 2022, spent 18 years at Booking.com running large parts of its hotel business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa."

"For WeRoad itself, the round closes one of the more visibly successful trajectories in European travel tech. The company runs multi-day organised tours, with a curated pool of tour guides, aimed primarily at the millennial-and-younger group-travel category that traditional tour operators have struggled to serve. WeRoad raised a €18m Series B in late 2023 and has compounded steadily since; the new $58m brings total funding to roughly $85-90m, with the Series C explicitly earmarked for US expansion."

"The US market is the harder of the two parts of WeRoad's plan. The European group-adventure-travel category has been growing on the back of millennial willingness to pay for structured social travel; the US analogue exists, but with stronger incumbents including Intrepid, G Adventures and the white-label tour layers inside Expedia and the Airbnb Experiences network itself."

Read at TNW | Investors-Funding