ECI's Travel Chapter announces intention to float

Greg Gille
21 October 2021

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Travel Chapter, a UK-based holiday accommodation booking company backed by ECI Partners, has announced its intention to float on London's AIM.

Admission is expected to take place by mid-November this year. GCA Altium is acting as lead financial adviser and nominated adviser. Numis Securities is acting as sole broker and bookrunner.

Phoenix Equity Partners sold its stake in Travel Chapter to ECI in early 2019, after a holding period of less than three years. Financial details of the transaction remained undisclosed, though the vendor generated a 3.6x return from the investment, equivalent to a 62% IRR.

ECI is invested in the business via its current fund, ECI 11, which closed on its GBP 700m hard-cap in 2018.

Travel Chapter was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Bideford, Devon. Its platform connects a supplier base of property owners with their customers, offering its access to a nationwide portfolio of more than 8,000 properties. It is the third largest holiday rental agency in the UK by size of property portfolio, listing approximately 10% of the UK's agency-managed holiday properties, the company said in a statement.

Its flagship brand, holidaycottages.co.uk, markets all of the group's properties and is supplemented by a network of 33 regional and lifestyle brands targeting a particular customer category, demographic or location.

Revenue and adjusted EBITDA grew between FY 2018 and FY 2020 at a CAGR of approximately 35% and 50%, respectively, before accounting for Covid-19 related exceptionals, according to the same statement.

Sponsors have capitalised on the IPO window this year, as reported by Unquote. In the first nine months of the year, financial-sponsor-backed IPOs on European exchanges reached USD 25.3bn in deal value across 41 listings, Dealogic data shows. This compares to just eight IPOs in the first nine months of 2020, worth a combined USD 6.3bn.

That said, a number of businesses postponed plans after initially looking to take advantage of apparent investor appetite. Most recently, restaurant chain Hawksmoor and brewer Brewdog both paused plans for their initial public offerings, citing pandemic recovery uncertainty in the hospitality sector.