Club Santa Monica, an invitation only travel club based out of Spain, has just secured €500K in a seed round from a number of renown local Spanish names, including Cabiedes and Partners, serial investor Alejandro Suarez and Real Madrid football player Alvaro Arbeloa, and other private investors from the travel and online sector.
Cabiedes and Partners is the early stage investment group led by Luis Martin Cabiedes, one of the first investors in Privalia, who recently secured an additional €70m in funding. Luis Martin Cabiedes is also the name behind numerous seed rounds in the Spanish startup scene.
Launched last June, Club Santa Monica is founded by Juan Dominguez who was a previous founder of Viajar.com (sold to Ya.com-Deutsche Telekom and later to Orizonia), and Miguel Angel Jiménez, ex-Managing Director of eBookers Spain and Viajar.com.
Club Santa Monica launched relatively quietly and has already grown its user-base to 100,000 to compete with the likes of Voyage Privé. Of course their primary obstacle and make or break will be their capacity to quickly generate a very large user-base. Booking travel, especially exclusive getaways on a limited time-frame, is not like buying shoes in a private online outlet. You need to catch people at the right time and they won’t buy as regularly, so you need to recycle users from buyers to lead generators to other club members.