Born in Britain, Owned Elsewhere

When I started this series examining travel tech hubs around the world — the India piece on reverse gravity in travel tech M&A, the Montreal piece on how an unlikely city became a quiet infrastructure powerhouse — I assumed the London story would be obvious, almost boringly so. Heathrow, the City, one of the world’s deepest corporate travel markets, English as the operating language, a time zone that bridges New York and Singapore, IAG and IHG headquartered there, Travelport and Whitbread and TUI, Booking.com and Expedia offices pulling in talent from across the continent. If you were designing a city in a lab to dominate global travel technology, you would design something that looks a lot like London.

And for a while, the UK did produce the companies that matched that promise. Lastminute.com in 1998, one of the first major European OTAs and for a brief delirious moment the symbol of what British internet entrepreneurship could become. Skyscanner out of Edinbur