This partnership with the holiday-flight specialist airline SunExpress, a joint venture of Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines, will offer boat holidays to its customers, the majority of which fly from Western Europe to Mediterranean Sea destinations such as Turkey, Greece, Croatia or Spain.
Zizoo.com, a leading global boat rental platform has partnered with SunExpress, a leading European holiday carrier, to cross-offer flight and boat deals to their customers. This is the first time that a major airline will be complementing its flight offering with increasingly popular boat holidays, bookable instantly.
Zizoo, an Axel Springer Plug and Play portfolio company, continued its strong growth in 2015 and has positioned itself at the forefront of the fast emerging online boat rental industry. This partnership with the holiday-flight specialist airline SunExpress, a joint venture of Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines, will offer boat holidays to its customers, the majority of which fly from Western Europe to Mediterranean Sea destinations such as Turkey, Greece, Croatia or Spain.
Starting from February 2015, all passengers on SunExpress flights to Turkey will be able to book a boat trip alongside their flight ticket. Zizoo’s boats will be bookable directly through the official SunExpress website. The companies are planning to extend the availability of combined trips to most of Zizoo/s European destinations in the upcoming months. Offers in Croatia, Greece and Spain will soon be made available.
As a global boat rental platform, Zizoo connects holidaymakers with boat charter companies. Their inventory includes over 5.000 boats in more than 200 locations across 25 countries from around the world. All of the boats are pre-screened and uploaded to the Zizoo platform by selected charter companies the company has partnered with. Sailing holidays are the fastest growing global travel trend, with an estimated 130 million people engaging in recreational sailing in Europe and the US alone each year. It is becoming ever more popular among the younger audience, who are choosing sailing vacations over traditional, “static” holidays. Still, only 10% of all bookings are happening online, which Zizoo is changing by providing boat operators with a unique inventory management tool, similar to booking.com/s Extranet. This also allows for real-time insights and profit-increasing tools such as yield management. Zizoo is the only company in this growing industry that is using technology to disrupt the industry also from the supply side, in principle owning and controling all the data. The companies are pushing the technology even further, by soon enabling flight passengers to rent a boat for their holidays through the in-flight entertainment system while they’re on the way to their summer destination.
“Our partnership with SunExpress will help travelers plan their summer holidays in a more enjoyable way,” says Anna Banicevic, CEO of Zizoo. “They’ll be able to book their flight and boat trip all in one place. This is just one step forward on our mission to make user experience with boat rentals as seamless as it is with other pillars in the travel sector. We want to make boat holidays standard in the travel industry and one of the ways to get closer to that goal is to merge with flight search engines, the same way hotels and car rental companies are already doing it. This is a significant milestone for the whole industry and we are working on more white-label/co-branding partnerships with travel leaders – a proof that the demand for boat rentals is becoming mainstream.”
The cooperation was facilitated by Lufthansa Innovation Hub, the newly established arm of the world/s largest airline company, which connected Zizoo and SunExpress. The co-branded technological solution offers additional revenue streams for both companies.
Zizoo (previously called “Zizooboats”) has offices in Berlin and Vienna and is led by an all-round international team headed by management coming from companies such as Google, eDreams, booking.com and iDirect. The company is backed by a group of international investors, including Axel Springer Plug and Play and has a high-profile Advisory Board headed by Robin Frewer, Director of Google/s European Travel division. Its rapid growth is continuing in 2015 with a mission to bring the large boat rental industry (there are more than 28 million recreational boat assets registered globally) into the digital era. Opening a new year with this exciting news, the Zizoo team aims to continue writing successful pages in the book of their journey.
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales.
She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
