Tighter capital markets will test travel startups - PhocusWire
For many travel companies, navigating the past two years has proven more challenging than normal. And recent capital market volatility has added to the pain, leaving many companies unprepared for this post-pandemic environment. Unchecked inflation, normalizing interest rates, upended labor markets and pandemic‐related supply chain challenges have contributed to weaker appetite for relatively riskier asset classes such as travel startups. This cycle reset, while painful for some, will ultimately create more valuable companies and a healthier sector through greater operating and funding discipline. As former Cisco System CEO John Chambers noted , “Marginal startups just will not get funded, but I actually think that’s a healthy phenomenon.” Let’s look at how we got here and what companies can do to best endure this cycle. "Plan for the worst" It’s instructive to frame this economic cycle around bookends. On the one bookend, policymakers opened the spigots in spring 2020 to