2 days ago
Tern acquires freelancer marketplace Lucia
Travel advisor technology platform Tern has acquired Lucia, a freelancer marketplace designed for the travel industry, for an undisclosed price.
Lucia is a place where travel advisors can post services they need help with.
Lucia's team, including CEO and founder Grace Van Hollebeke, will join Tern. Van Hollebeke takes on the role of head of marketing and services.
Tern is headed by cofounder and CEO David Shull.
Trade Secrets podcast: A spotlight on Tern and Lucia
For users of Lucia, Van Hollebeke said, it will be "business as usual, even down to the name." Now known as Lucia by Tern, the day-to-day operations will remain the same with the team and platform migrating to Tern.
"Hopefully, it's not always going to be business as usual. Hopefully we'll keep making improvements and adjustments as we always want to be," she said.
Shull and Van Hollebeke met at Virtuoso Travel Week in 2023. They stayed loosely in touch, but reconnected earlier this year at the Las Vegas Travel Agent Forum, Shull said. That's when they said they realized how well their products meshed. Tern was in the process of closing on $17 million in funding.
"We were thinking about, how do we become the holistic platform for travel advisors?" Shull said.
A week later, he texted Van Hollebeke about a potential acquisition.
"From Lucia's perspective, it was the idea of working with someone we really respected," Van Hollebeke said. "But also, we knew that they were closing on this funding and would have a tremendous amount of resources behind them. The mission of Lucia has always been to promote and support these small businesses, so the idea of doing it with them just seemed really exciting."
Shull said both companies are built to support small businesses.
"What is really special about this is we can now offer both the great technology as well as this network of service providers that are trained in the travel industry that know how to deliver this type of service -- whether it's marketing or destination guides or migrating data -- in a really cool way," he said.
Over time, Shull said he hopes to use the scale of Tern to lower the costs of using the Lucia copilot network. (Lucia calls its freelancers "copilots".).
Additionally, a four-part certification will launch next week for copilots interested in becoming Tern Certified CoPilots.
"Combining the tech platform with the services layer is going to mean that if you're a Tern advisor, you are just set up to be so much more efficient as a business owner," Shull said.
