“Can a members-only luxury travel flash-sale platform scale globally by modernising supplier payment infrastructure while retaining margin through exclusive deals unavailable elsewhere online?”
Founded in 2011 as a UK-based members-only luxury travel deals club, Secret Escapes grew to 60 million users across 10 territories by leveraging flash-sale mechanics to fill unsold hotel inventory. The company survived COVID-19 with emergency fundraising and returned to profitability on EBITDA by 2022. In 2024 it modernised its supplier payments infrastructure by adopting Nium's virtual card solution for cross-border hotel payouts — moving from manual FX reconciliation to automated multi-currency disbursements, signalling a maturation of its embedded finance stack on the payables side.
Secret Escapes uses Nium for FX and cross-border payouts.
The Embedded Finance Index 2026 maps 2 layers in Secret Escapes's stack: Unified APIs (Nium); FX & payouts (Nium).
Secret Escapes is founded in 2011 and headquartered in London, UK (4th Floor, 120 Holborn, London, EC1N 2TD).
Secret Escapes has raised $299.21M in total (latest round: Series F, July 2023).
Get a read on where your own stack stands against Secret Escapes and the rest of its category — what they built versus bought, which providers they use, and where the gaps in your own strategy and competitive set actually are.