Travel.com.au has urged its shareholders to sit tight as the online travel agent considers new, significantly improved bids received yesterday from rival suitors Wotif.com and Webjet.
Earlier this week Wotif.com lodged a $50 billion dollar bid for Travel.com.au, trumping an earlier proposal by Webjet that had already received the recommendation of the Travel.com.au board.
Then yesterday things really hotted up. First Webjet made a new offer for the company that improved on its previous bid by 19% and, according to chairman David Clarke, trumped Wotif.com’s 50c per share bid with a mixed cash and share offer with an implied value of 54.47c per share.
Not long after Wotif.com responded with its own counter-bid, the last minute online accommodation business ratcheting up its offer to $54.8 million, available to shareholders either as an all-cash or all-shares deal.
The ball is now in Travel.com.au’s court, at least for the moment. In a statement released today the company’s board urged shareholders to “take no action” until it had completed its assessment of the competing offers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COMMENTS
SmartCompany is committed to hosting lively discussions. Help us keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming. We aim to publish comments quickly in the interest of promoting robust conversation, but we’re a small team and we deploy filters to protect against legal risk. Occasionally your comment may be held up while it is being reviewed, but we’re working as fast as we can to keep the conversation rolling.
The SmartCompany comment section is members-only content. Please subscribe to leave a comment.
The SmartCompany comment section is members-only content. Please login to leave a comment.