As already announced this past week, Burda Digital Ventures and W Media Ventures have jointly invested in Escapio.com, a booking platform for selected hotels. Escapio is a sister company of Tripsbytips, the German travel community that Uwe Frers and myself started about 3 years ago. As Uwe is also the entrepreneur behind Escapio, it made sense to streamline ownership structures between the two companies. But besides this aspect, Escapio provides two major opportunities. Firstly, as available content and inventory grows on the Internet (and the travel vertical is definitely one of the leading segments in this respect), helping people to select the right thing becomes more and more important. This is a core priority for general search engines like Google but there is at least as much potential in specific verticals to address this problem. Escapio positions itself as being a destination site with a selection of exceptional, hand-picked hotels providing the consumer the necessary guidance to find the absolutely best hotels in hundreds of locations (check out their hotel selections for Paris, Barcelona or Tuscany). Secondly, we have seen in the past years that content and transactions become more and more intertwined. Aligning Tripsbytips and Escapio more closely going forward will help both companies grow quicker than they could have as stand-alone sites. Very excited about adding another company to the W Media portfolio – welcome Escapio!