103

News

Momondo taking flight on the wings of growth

Christian Wenande
May 10th, 2016


This article is more than 8 years old.

Copenhagen-based travel site continues to aim for the skies

Momondo won’t shirk in the face of lofty ambitions (photo: Momondo)

Danish travel search engine Momondo is continuing its meteoric rise thanks to financial results that reveal strong growth for 2015.

The Copenhagen-based company enjoyed 63 percent growth in 2015, despite the travel industry facing a challenging year due to low oil prices and terror attacks.

“We are satisfied with 63 percent growth,” Pia Vemmelund, the head of Momondo, told Børsen newspaper.

“We had to endure a lot of things in 2015. We have developed our product, and our improvements mean that people return to us.”

The sterling growth figures are down to the development of a new hotel site, a new app, and TV marketing in several nations – including Germany. This year, the company will hedge its bets on TV marketing in 11 new nations.

READ MORE: Travel app to include private companies

Successfully falling short
But despite the growth, Momondo has aimed for better. In 2014, the company launched a three-year plan to reach 1 billion kroner in turnover by the end of 2017.

Those lofty ambitions hinged on annual growth of 100 percent, and following growth of 76 percent in 2014 and 63 percent last year, the goal is looking more and more like pie in the sky.

“We are a company that sets ambitious targets and we know there is always a risk of not reaching the goals we have set,” said Vemmelund.

“The whole idea behind being ambitious and setting high targets is that it forces us to think and act differently. Then we’ll attain results that are better than if we had made a strategy involving 10-20 percent growth.”

Vemmelund said that while Momondo was profitable in certain markets, but not globally, its investors prefer to see growth initially and profit in the long term. The goal was to begin to see profit in 2017.


Share

Most popular

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to receive The Daily Post

















Latest Podcast

A survey carried out by Megafon for TV2 has found that 71 percent of parents have handed over children to daycare in spite of them being sick.

Moreover, 21 percent of those surveyed admitted to medicating their kids with paracetamol, such as Panodil, before sending them to school.

The FOLA parents’ organisation is shocked by the findings.

“I think it is absolutely crazy. It simply cannot be that a child goes to school sick and plays with lots of other children. Then we are faced with the fact that they will infect the whole institution,” said FOLA chair Signe Nielsen.

Pill pushers
At the Børnehuset daycare institution in Silkeborg a meeting was called where parents were implored not to bring their sick children to school.

At Børnehuset there are fears that parents prefer to pack their kids off with a pill without informing teachers.

“We occasionally have children who that they have had a pill for breakfast,” said headteacher Susanne Bødker. “You might think that it is a Panodil more than a vitamin pill, if it is a child who has just been sick, for example.”

Parents sick and tired
Parents, when confronted, often cite pressure at work as a reason for not being able to stay at home with their children.

Many declare that they simply cannot take another day off, as they are afraid of being fired.

Allan Randrup Thomsen, a professor of virology at KU, has heavily criticised the parents’ actions, describing the current situation as a “vicious circle”.

“It promotes the spread of viruses, and it adds momentum to a cycle where parents are pressured by high levels of sick-leave. If they then choose to send the children to daycare while they are still recovering, they keep the epidemic going in daycares, and this in turn puts a greater burden on the parents.”