one of the newest companies to get listed on a stock exchange is denverheadquartered inspirato nasdaq ispo which went public on feb 11 following its merger with thayer ventures acquisition corp nasdaq tvac a special purpose acquisition company spac founded in 2011 by brothers brent and brad handler inspirato operates a proprietary subscription platform that matches travelers with a portfolio of more than 385 exclusively managed branded luxury vacation homes and over 500 fivestar hotel and resort partners in more than 240 destinations around the world in 2019 the company unveiled its inspirato pass which is billed as the first luxury travel subscription inclusive of nightly rates taxes and fees inspirato which has an 800person workforce secured more than 100 million in net proceeds from its spac merger and the combined company began trading with an initial valuation of approximately 11 billion benzinga spoke with cofounder and ceo brent handler on inspirato’s journey from concept to stock exchange q what inspired your company’s journey from being privately owned to being publicly traded brent handler i had started a company called exclusive resorts in 2002 and left at the end of 2009 it was another kind of luxury vacation company and was sold to steve case 2010 was a year when my brother and i came up with the concept for inspirato we had a oneyear noncompete clause and then we sold our first membership on jan 1 2011 we introduced the inspirato pass in 2019 right before the pandemic and we had this really big growth engine we wanted to grow in a way thats just too difficult as a private company we went through a formal fundraising process almost exactly a year ago and were thinking of either a traditional ipo working with a spac or a larger latestage private round ubs nyse ubs were our bankers and we ultimately decided to go the spac route we met several spacs along the way and thayer had a lot of domain expertise in travel it seemed like a really good fit q what is the state of luxury travel today brent handler ive been doing this for 20 years and luxury travel has never been in the place that it is today the tailwinds behind luxury travel are incredible – weve done some work that shows that this market is a 100 billion opportunity for american travelers and theres never been such supply constraints its extremely expensive to build luxury hotels – you dont see many new fivestar luxury hotels in resort destinations like you did 10 or 15 years ago on the residential side were very good – we manage and control these homes through a longterm lease so were not like a broker were unique in that we can provide that experience to our subscribers and the demand to be able to stay at a home and have the service and certainty of a four seasons is sort of off the charts – there’s a lot of positive market dynamic going on q are you concerned about the current economic issues such as growing inflation and extreme stock market swings on this sector brent handler theres a lot of wealth out there despite whats going on in the market today – this sort of little blip that were having – theres still been more wealth created in the last 10 years than ever before the other thing thats happening and were also gaining from this trend is where people want to spend money on experiences more than things its not just that theyre wealthy and its not just that we have residences versus hotels there is more vacation luxury supply than city luxury supply cities like new york city have kept up with luxury fivestar hotels but hotels in places like hawaii have not kept up so if you’re going on vacation if you really want the best of the best its just become more expensive and more difficult to do q now that you are a publicly traded company have you been giving thought to acquiring other companies and growing your operations that way brent handler weve been giving it thought but we dont have any specific thoughts obviously having a public company provides us more opportunity – one of the factors to go public was being able to have more success in the ma front but we dont have anything lined up q what is on the companys agenda for the rest of 2022 and what can you do for an encore after going on the nasdaq brent handler we’re at the end of the going public process but it feels like its the beginning of a big story and the story is bringing subscription travel to more people the business model of the inspirato pass – 2500 a month no nightly rates taxes or fees – is highly disruptive people have been talking about how could you do subscription travel for a really really long time and many have taken shots at it inspirato figured that out so for us investing in subscription travel from a technology standpoint and a personalization standpoint making the experience better and easier for these families to enjoy is really important the real driver more so even than technology is inventory getting subscribers and retaining subscribers is super easy so youll see that we’ll become more aggressive in building out a bigger team taking on more and better inventory more inventory owners are reaching out to us now because theyre understanding how our model works and how we lease the inventory from them theres definitely a flywheel effect that happens in these marketplacetype subscription businesses  q where is your inventory brent handler we focus on where north americans want to travel so our biggest inventories are in the us with the second most in latin america the third in the caribbean and the fourth in europe we dont have anything in asia australia new zealand – nothing that is super hard to get to because we take risk i dont foresee in the next three quarters having a big focus on international expansion for subscriber acquisition especially when there is so much opportunity just in the us