Source: FLYLA

FLYLA, the travel platform for students, completes its first financing round. Among the investors are the former CFO of Jochen Schweizer and business angels from the established apaFriends investor group which focus on start-ups in the hospitality and travel technology sector. The new capital will primarily be used to expand marketing and development resources in order to enhance the current FLYLA travel platform and to integrate new airline partners. The investment will also be used to increase marketing activities.

The FLYLA founders have also been successful in pulling together an advisory board with renowned personalities from travel and hospitality. The board will support FLYLA in strategic and conceptual decisions and assist in the worldwide expansion of the innovative travel platform. As chairman of the advisory board has been elected Carl-Stefan Neumann, Director Emeritus of McKinsey & Company. Further advisory board members include the CEOs Markus Orth (Lufthansa City Center), Michael Becker (e-travel GmbH), Oliver Wagner (Eurowings) and Uli Pillau (apaleo).

FLYLA enables students to discover the world and offers a travel platform with attractive and affordable flight offers. The first partners include Eurowings, Lufthansa Group, Etihad Airways and other well-established international airlines. Fabian Höhne, founder and CEO of FLYLA, comments on the successful financing round as follows: "We are very pleased about the trust and support of renowned investors. We will use the new financial resources for the expansion of our booking platform and technology, personalization and team building. Together we will build the world's largest travel platform for students".

"FLYLA addresses a great market segment considering the growing content differentiation of the top airlines, the huge potential of the student travel and the technical competence the FLYLA founders have forms the basis for the success", adds Markus Orth, long-standing CEO of L'Tur Lastminute AG and current Managing Director of Lufthansa City Center. Orth further comments: "This niche must now be consistently expanded with product, service and added value for students."

FLYLA verifies students in real-time via a federated authentication system provided by universities worldwide. The underlying proprietary booking engine was developed with a special focus on the IATA NDC standard. Direct connections to airlines enable the platform to access special fares and other attractive offers. Tickets are brokered and issued without the need for third-party providers. Ten more airlines are scheduled to be integrated via the NDC interface in 2019. The customer focus will remain on students at universities in German-speaking countries until 2020 when FLYLA will expand its offer to 20 million students in other European key countries.

About FLYLA

The FLYLA GmbH was founded by its founders Frederic Lapatschek and Fabian Höhne in the February 2018 in Munich. The booking platform FLYLA.de went online on 1 October 2018. Both founders are graduates of the Technical University of Munich and were initially supported here. The team has received further support from the LMU Entrepreneurship Center, the XPRENEURS Accelerator and the American accelerator MassChallenge. The project was financially supported by the EXIST start-up scholarship for innovative ideas of the Federal Government. The enterprise is among other things member in the Verband Internet Reisevertrieb (VIR). Its partners include Eurowings, Lufthansa Group, Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways.