ZOZI, the online service that focuses on deals for high-end outdoor adventures and activities, today announced that it has acquired the real-time reservation system TripFlavor. ZOZI, which recently closed a $10 million funding round, already put the acquisition to good use and is using TripFlavor’s technology to power its new ZOZI Advance real-time booking, scheduling, payments and customer relation management platform for activity merchants, which also launched today. Neither TripFlavor nor ZOZI disclosed the size of the acquisition.
The actual acquisition by ZOZI quietly happened in Q4 2012, a ZOZI spokesperson told me earlier this week, and ZOZI has been working to integrate its technology into its Advance platform since. TripFlavor’s own site, it seems, was shut down quite a while ago and it’s not clear how much traction it ever had.
TripFlavor was founded by early Airbnb employee Sam Edelson and former Ning engineer Gene Drabkin in 2011. The company raised funding from a number of angel investors, including Nathan Blecharczyk (co-founder & CTO of Airbnb); Mark Leslie (founder, chairman and CEO of Veritas Software); and Ken Keller (co-founder of IGN Entertainment).
“The large activities market has long been underserved because most companies lack several pieces to the puzzle,” said TripFlavor CEO Edelson in a statement today. “After meeting with many potential strategic partners, it was clear that ZOZI had all the pieces in place and we wanted our technology to be part of the platform that will ultimately power the active lifestyle market.”
According to ZOZI CEO TJ Sassani the new Advance platform “is unique for activity merchants because it’s the first platform to also bring substantial, high-quality new customer flow to the merchant via a branded channel, ZOZI.com.” The company is launching this tool in the U.S. and Canada, but in the long run, ZOZI plans to make it available globally.