Groupon Buys SideTour To Add Local, Bespoke Activities To Its GrouponLive Events Business. A little over a week after Groupon announced the acquisition of hotel booking service Blink, today comes one more purchase that moves Groupon further yet out of the realm of daily deals.
Groupon has bought SideTour, a marketplace where people can book places for small-scale, bespoke activities, and post their own events, too. Groupon says that SideTour will continue to operate as a separate entity “for some time” as its activity listings start to get distributed via Groupon’s email, web and mobile channels. The SideTour team, as led by CEO Vipin Goyal, will work out of Groupon’s New York offices, reporting to Greg Rudin, GM of GrouponLive. This is the JV between Groupon and Live Nation, which first opened for business in 2011 focused on live event ticket deals, but appears to be diversifying into other kinds of events within Groupon’s wider deals database, which stood at a whopping 54,000 events as of Q2. Groupon is not disclosing the value of the deal.
E-tourisme: le social travel en plein essor.