Travel Trackers has built its business around a deep understanding of hospitality, data, and the operational realities facing businesses in the African safari and hospitality industry. Its business intelligence and analytics solutions turn operational data into practical reporting that helps hospitality operators understand performance, identify trends, and make more informed decisions.
For Tom and Kate Imrie, the team behind Travel Trackers, joining Volaris Group meant preserving what they had built while gaining the expertise, infrastructure, and wider network needed to take the business to its next phase.
From Hospitality Operators to Analytics Entrepreneurs
Travel Trackers’ story began long before the business itself.
In 2004, Tom and Kate Imrie left Johannesburg to pursue careers in hospitality, spending more than a decade working at a game lodge in South Africa. There, they hosted guests from around the world while raising their family in one of the country’s wildlife regions.
As their children grew older, Tom and Kate decided it was time for another chapter. They left the lodge, travelled through Asia and Europe, and began considering how they could apply their years of hospitality experience in a different way.
The opportunity came through Pomerol Partners, a business intelligence company founded by Tom’s brother in the United Kingdom. The idea was straightforward: combine Tom and Kate’s knowledge of hospitality operations with business intelligence technology and see whether the same analytical capabilities being used by large companies could be applied to game reserves, hotels, and other hospitality operators.
With support from ResRequest in extracting and organizing hospitality data, the idea developed into a proof of concept and eventually a dedicated hospitality analytics division within Pomerol Partners.
By 2018, Tom and Kate Imrie had returned to South Africa and were operating a fully developed hospitality analytics practice. Following the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, they made another pivotal decision: when travel returned, they would build the business independently.
In early 2022, the division separated from Pomerol Partners and Travel Trackers began operating on its own. From there, growth came largely through reputation.
“We’ve just organically grown through word of mouth, bumped into people who’ve seen our analytics in other places and just grown,” Tom said.
That deliberate approach allowed Travel Trackers to build a stable base of recurring customers while remaining a lean, two-person operation.
Reaching an Inflection Point
By 2025, however, the technology landscape around Travel Trackers was beginning to change.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence was creating new possibilities for how hospitality businesses could interact with data, generate reports, and make decisions. For Tom and Kate, those developments created both uncertainty and opportunity.
Rather than viewing AI solely as a threat to an established analytics business, they began asking how Travel Trackers could participate in that evolution.
“Rather than being squashed by AI, why don’t we see if we can be part of the growth?” Tom recalled.
At the same time, the company was reaching another important inflection point. Travel Trackers had approximately 50 customers, was profitable, and had the potential to grow significantly. But scaling independently would require more people, additional technology infrastructure, broader integrations with reservation systems, and new expertise in AI.
For Tom and Kate, bigger was not automatically better. Their motivation had never simply been to build the largest company possible.
“The promise of bigger business and more money wasn’t what motivated us,” Tom said. “Providing solutions and getting feedback that our tools were helpful is what motivated us.”
What they wanted was a way to grow without losing the qualities that had made Travel Trackers successful in the first place.
Finding the Right Partner Close to Home
That search for a path forward led naturally to ResRequest.
Travel Trackers had worked closely with ResRequest for years, and the majority of its customers were already ResRequest clients. The teams knew one another well, trusted one another, and shared a similar understanding of the hospitality market.
Tom approached ResRequest to discuss working together more closely on AI and new reporting capabilities. ResRequest itself had recently joined Volaris Group and introduced Tom and Kate to the possibility of following the same path.
The idea immediately resonated.
What stood out was not simply Volaris Group’s scale, but its philosophy of acquiring businesses with the intention of owning and developing them for the long term.
Tom and Kate did not conduct a broad sale process or shop Travel Trackers to multiple buyers. The existing trust with ResRequest, combined with what they learned about Volaris and Constellation Software, gave them confidence that they had found the right fit.
For Tom and Kate, that continuity mattered. They were looking for an environment where they could scale and develop new capabilities without having to reinvent the culture or identity of the business.
“It was a safe space,” Kate explained. “We didn’t want to have to reinvent who we were or the way we did things to scale and move into AI.”
A Personal Approach to the M&A Process
From their earliest discussions with Volaris, Tom and Kate were struck by the people involved.
Their first conversations with Stephanie Laws created an immediate sense of energy and openness. Tom described her as proactive, positive, and someone who made them feel comfortable from the outset.
The acquisition ultimately took longer than initially anticipated. Part of that was due to organizational changes taking place on the acquiring side, while part reflected the realities of preparing a small, founder-led business for an acquisition.
Travel Trackers had not been built with a future sale in mind. Some financial information had to be reorganized and explained, and Tom and Kate needed time to work through requirements they had never previously encountered.
In retrospect, the additional time became a benefit.
“If it had happened in eight weeks, I think we would have been nervous wrecks,” Tom said. The longer process gave them time to become comfortable with the information being requested and with the change ahead.
There was also a late complication when Tom realized the acquisition would be structured differently than he had originally understood, creating tax and financial considerations that he had not anticipated. Rather than allowing the issue to derail the acquisition, the teams worked through it together.
For Tom, the experience reinforced one of his strongest impressions of Volaris.
“The whole process felt a lot more personal than transactional,” he said. “We were being considered as people rather than this being just a financial transaction to suit somebody else’s balance sheet.”
That sense of partnership remained intact even when difficult or unexpected issues had to be resolved.
Protecting Business Continuity While Integration Takes Shape
Because Travel Trackers joined Volaris only recently, its integration is still underway.
Rather than immediately changing how the company operates, the early focus has been on maintaining business continuity while gradually connecting Travel Trackers with the wider ResRequest, Adapt IT, and Volaris ecosystem.
The company’s core software, customer relationships, and day-to-day service have continued largely unchanged. At the same time, Tom and Kate have begun meeting colleagues across their new organization, joining team meetings, accessing new learning opportunities, and participating in early discussions about the future of the product.
For two people who had operated largely on their own for years, becoming part of a wider team has been one of the most immediate changes.
“We’re loving being part of a team again,” Tom said. “We’re even more excited to look at the bigger teams and the bigger opportunities to meet people, network and share.”
The gradual approach has also helped ensure that customers experience continuity while the organizational integration progresses.
From Concerns About Attrition to a Growing Pipeline
Before the acquisition, Tom and Kate had one significant concern: how would their customers react?
They wondered whether some customers might become cautious about Travel Trackers joining a larger organization or decide that the business was no longer the independent partner they had originally chosen.
The response was the opposite.
Customers across the business, including those not using ResRequest, reacted positively to the news. Instead of customer attrition, Travel Trackers saw new opportunities emerge.
“We were nervous about attrition, but instead we got growth,” Tom said.
The company’s pipeline has expanded, helped in part by Travel Trackers being discussed more frequently in ResRequest customer conversations. Tom also believes becoming part of a larger organization has strengthened the company’s credibility in the market.
“The pipeline is a lot bigger,” he said. “The fact that we are part of ResRequest and not this extra third-party tool has been good.”
For Travel Trackers, the early response provides evidence that the acquisition can strengthen rather than disrupt the relationships the company spent years building.
Preserving Experience While Roles Evolve
Joining a larger organization has also created changes for Tom and Kate personally.
As a two-person company, both had traditionally performed a wide range of functions. Tom’s role spanned leadership, client relationships, and software development, while Kate had been central to administration, customer onboarding, training, and client support.
Following the acquisition, some of Kate’s administrative responsibilities began moving into the wider organization. That created understandable uncertainty about how her role would evolve.
What reassured both Tom and Kate was the message they received from their new colleagues: their value was not limited to the individual tasks they had previously performed. Their years of hospitality, customer, and analytics knowledge would continue to matter as the business changed.
Kate’s focus is increasingly shifting toward customer engagement. She is connecting directly with clients to better understand how they use Travel Trackers’ tools, where gaps remain, and what customers may need as the company introduces new capabilities.
Tom, meanwhile, is increasingly focused on software development and imagining the next generation of business intelligence and reporting.
For both, the transition reflects a broader opportunity to apply the experience they have accumulated while learning new skills inside a much larger technology organization. The opportunity for personal development has become another unexpected benefit of the acquisition, with access to learning programs, new colleagues, and potential career paths that would not have existed while operating independently.
“We definitely feel less alone,” they shared. “We’re excited about the networking, we’re excited about the courses, and we’re speaking to a lot more people.”
Building the Next Generation of Reporting
The most significant opportunity ahead remains the same one that initially led Travel Trackers to seek a partner: artificial intelligence.
Tom and Kate are now working with the ResRequest team to explore what AI-enabled business intelligence could look like for hospitality operators.
Early discussions have already begun around how reporting can evolve and how Travel Trackers’ years of domain knowledge can be combined with new technology.
For Tom, one of the most reassuring realizations has been that while technology may change dramatically, the knowledge he and Kate have accumulated remains relevant.
“The technology may change, but the skills and the learnings that we’ve acquired will be very useful in the way that it is shaped,” he said.
That distinction is important. Travel Trackers is not approaching AI simply as another feature to add to an existing product. The team is considering how the way hospitality operators consume data and make decisions could fundamentally change.
Tom describes his evolving focus as thinking about “this incredible new landscape for reporting and business intelligence and helping people make smarter decisions with AI.”
While the exact destination is still taking shape, Travel Trackers no longer has to navigate that shift alone. The business can now draw on ResRequest’s expertise, Volaris Group’s network, and the broader technology ecosystem around it.
“No one really knows exactly which way it is going to go,” Tom said. “But we feel like we’re the right people to be having those discussions about how it’s going to evolve.”
A New Chapter Built Around Long-Term Growth
For Travel Trackers, joining Volaris Group was never simply about selling a business.
It was about finding the right environment for the business, its customers, and the people behind it to continue developing.
Tom admits that his original perception of mergers and acquisitions was very different. He associated an acquisition with a company being purchased, restructured, and optimized primarily for financial return.
His experience with Volaris changed that perception.
“I would wholeheartedly recommend it,” Tom said. “Volaris is interested in long-term sustainable growth, both for Kate and myself and for our business.”
Kate echoed the importance of the people they have encountered since joining, describing her new colleagues as welcoming and friendly. For a team that spent years operating largely on its own, the opportunity to become part of a broader community has been meaningful.
There is still much of Travel Trackers’ post-acquisition story left to write. Integration is ongoing, its AI roadmap is developing, and Tom and Kate’s roles will continue to evolve.
But the direction is clear.
The specialized hospitality knowledge, customer relationships, and analytical expertise that built Travel Trackers remain at the centre of the business. What has changed is the environment around them, giving the team a larger network, new expertise, and greater capacity to explore what comes next.
For Travel Trackers, the acquisition provides an opportunity to preserve what made the company successful while building for a technology landscape that is changing faster than ever.
