Rezdy

Rezdy

Rezdy launched in 2011 when co-founder Simon Lenoir struggled to manage bookings for a small sailing business north of Sydney. The platform emerged as a pure B2B infrastructure play, giving tours and activity operators a central dashboard to manage reservations, availability, and distribution channels. Lenoir bootstrapped the firm early, then raised a modest AU$1.1 million in 2014 from Ballistic Ventures and local angels to expand into North America. The platform is a distribution switchboard. Operators connect their inventory to a network of resellers — Viator, GetYourGuide, Expedia, and hundreds of local concierge desks and hotel partners — all syncing in real time. Rezdy itself never touches the consumer; it operates strictly as the rails between supply and demand. By 2019, the firm reported processing over $2 billion in annual gross bookings across 150,000 experiences in 100 countries, from New Zealand glacier hikes to Paris cooking classes. The product suite includes Rezdy Channel Manager for enterprise suppliers and a white-label marketplace builder for destination marketing organizations. After Lenoir stepped back as CEO, Chris Atkin took the reins in 2019, bringing a growth-equity lens from his previous role scaling SafetyCulture. The pandemic cut domestic Australian tourism bookings by over 90% in April 2020, forcing Rezdy to cut costs sharply and double down on operator tools that could monetize local, socially-distanced experiences. The firm survived the trough and, in March 2023, announced a merger with Canadian rival Checkfront, creating the largest independent booking-software provider in the tours and activities sector, backed by private equity from PSG Equity. The combined entity operates from Sydney and Toronto. The merger itself is the structural differentiator. Rezdy and Checkfront each dominated separate hemispheres — Asia-Pacific and North America respectively — and operated as bitter competitors for a decade. Combining them under PSG Equity created a single scaled entity that can service enterprise clients like City Sightseeing and Big Bus Tours while still offering a self-serve tier for mom-and-pop operators. The structure is a roll-up play for a software vertical that remains wildly fragmented, with fewer than 10% of global tour operators using a dedicated reservation system.