Travel site WAYN.com raises $11M for travel social networking site

WAYN.com, a London-based social networking travel web site, has raised $11m (£5.7m).

It lets users enter details of where they are and where they have traveled in the past, and how they can share information about say, the best bars in New York. It resembles RealTravel, a Silicon Valley site that does that sort of thing.

It says it wants to be the MySpace of the travel business. It says it is already profitable (although it did start in 2002, so that is good). It also says it has been able to convert about 100,000 users into subscribers paying up to £7.50 a month.

Esprit Capital Partners led the investment. LastMinute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman also invested, along with David Soskin and Hugo Burge, of Cheapflights; Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips of Active Hotels (which was sold in 2004), and Constant Tedder of Jagex, an online games company.

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