Outside Inc. Buys Northstar’s Inntopia to Add Trip Booking to Offerings

Outside Interactive Inc., an outdoor media and events company, bought Inntopia, a travel and hospitality software platform, from Northstar Travel Group last week. Terms were not disclosed.

Inntopia, founded in 2001, develops software for the outdoor leisure, resort and destination travel industries, including marketing CRM, ecommerce platform and business intelligence products. Among their customers are Vail Resorts, Alterra Mountain Company and Big Cedar Lodge.

Outside Interactive, which includes Outside Magazine and Yoga Journal, reaches over 300 million unique users and has more than 100 million registered users across 25 media, service and utility brands. Outside’s goal in buying Inntopia was to offer readers and members the ability to book and purchase on their site instead of, for example, reading about Yellowstone but having to go elsewhere to actually find the flights, hotels and guides.

“Many people come to our properties, they want to know where to go, right? They want to know what to do,” Chief Executive Officer Robin Thurston told AMO. But once they found what they wanted, they would go elsewhere to book the trips. “If we write a story about the top five ski resorts in North America, we don’t guide you after that into the travel booking. We just kind of say, ‘Hey, here’s some great information from a travel writer, good luck on your own, go find how to book that. Go find the ski instructor. Go figure out how to buy tickets.’”

Sales in 2025 will total “well over” $100 million and the combined company will have about 430 employees. The goal, according to Thurston, is to grow at least 20% year-over-year and have 70% of revenue come from software and subscriptions. Currently, 60% comes from those sources.

Outside Inc. laid off 20 members of the magazine’s editorial and business staff to focus on categories like snow, cycling and climbing, Heather Dietrick, chief media officer at Outside told AMO. The editorial team across Outside Inc. brands remains one of its largest groups of employees with over 60 full-time content creators and contributors, she said.

Thurston said the plan is to take the company public in the next three to four years.

Northstar Travel Group, which has been owned by investment funds managed by EagleTree Capital since 2016, didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did EagleTree.

“The divestiture of Inntopia aligns with Northstar’s strategic focus on its core media, events, and marketing solutions for the global travel industry,” Northstar said in a statement.

In 2020, Pocket Outdoor Media acquired the healthy living, fitness and outdoor divisions of Active Interest Media, which coincided with the closing of its Series A investment. In 2021, it bought Outside Integrated Media and rebranded as Outside Interactive. That same year, Outside bought Pinkbike and sister brands CyclingTips and Trailforks, as well as Cairn, which sells curated outdoor goods to consumers on a subscription basis, and Roam Media and Inkwell Media. In 2022, it purchased Fastest Known Time, a database of speed records in running, hiking and endurance sports.

Later in 2022, Thurston announced two rounds of layoffs after beginning “a major push to focus on profitability” and was forced to raise additional capital to support the company.

“While we are hitting our revised membership goals, the slowdown in consumer spending has affected our events and cut into the double-digit growth in ad sales we enjoyed in the first three quarters of the year,” Thurston wrote at the time.

“Have we made decisions that contributed to this situation? Yes. We’ve pursued ambitious growth projections and spent too freely. We’ve made investments that I’d think twice about now, and we’ve been slower to realize synergies when adding new companies. We’ve also scaled staffing and compensation at a much faster rate than we’ve grown revenue.”

Last year, Outside picked up MapMyFitness Outdoor Fitness Tracking Applications from Under Armour.

While this latest acquisition was made with some financing, Thurston is looking to bolster the company and have it stand on its own.

“We’re completely focused on being a self-sustaining company that’s both profitable and cash flow positive, so that we can grow into the future, leveraging our own resources rather than having to raise new capital,” Thurston told AMO.

AMO’s Take

By: Jacob Cohen Donnelly

It’s good to see Outside coming out from the other side of its downward trend during the latter years of the pandemic. As many media companies experienced, the incredible growth during the early pandemic years was quickly cut off when interest rates increased and consumer attention decreased coupled with decreasing advertising spend. It’s a scar I carry.

I’m particularly interested in two main things from this announcement.

Revenue multiply moves

Outside is taking a giant step closer to the point of sale, which will result in an increase in revenue across two paths. The first is with Outside being a selling point for the software itself. If the publisher will now handle bookings directly on its sites, not being a part of that could be a liability for resorts. When a sales rep at Inntopia goes in to a client, they can say, “your resort may be distributed to 300 million unique users.” That’s compelling.

Depending on how successful Outside is with promoting these resorts, Inntopia could generate more revenue for these resorts than the software itself costs. There aren’t many tools that can actually make you money, but this sort of distribution tied to the software could work.

The other way Outside is likely going to generate revenue is with traditional performance marketing. While it’s unclear what Outside’s plans are here, Thurston’s example of writing about the top five ski resorts and allowing the booking right on their sites seems like a clear-cut performance marketing play. According to Cloudbeds, online travel agents generate commissions of 15-30%. That could quickly become a big revenue driver.

And so, you’ve got a strong pitch to these resorts that Outside will be able to drive more business, which will make it easier to sell Inntopia. On the other side, you’ve got the ability to charge these same resorts a commission for driving more business. If it works, it’s a very compelling argument.

Northstar’s failure to sell?

The second thing I found interesting is that Northstar decided to sell a division of the business. It has owned Inntopia since 2014. The statement refers to the “core media, events, and marketing solutions for the global travel industry,” and a software business doesn’t fit in that.

But there is a question about the timing of this deal. Northstar spent a significant amount of time last year trying to get a deal done to sell itself in its entirety, according to multiple sources, but couldn’t quite get across the finish line.

One banker told me that they simply wanted too much in a time when those multiples weren’t warranted, especially considering a decent chunk of the business is still print advertising. Even if it’s profitable revenue, PE doesn’t want to touch it.

Another argument is that EagleTree Capital is patient. It’s held ALM Media since 2014, two years longer than Northstar Travel. It also held Penton Media, another B2B media and events company, from 2005 to 2016, so it clearly has the patience. On the other hand, that desire for a Penton-like multiple could be hurting it: it sold for $1.56 billion to Informa, which is a bit over an 11x EBITDA multiple. This does potentially reinforce the last statement about wanting too much. Is it patience or lofty expectations?

Whatever the case, selling off the software business could be a way of generating some return for EagleTree while it waits to sell the broader business. The asset should move this year with M&A markets opening up, but whether it’s at a price that EagleTree wants remains to be seen.

Update: This story was updated on February 12 to reflect the reported layoffs.