If you have ever been traveling and, upon arriving at your destination, you have wanted to book an excursion in Spanish, a skip-the-line entry or a transfer without complications, it is quite possible that you have come across Civitatis. The company, based in Spain and founded in 2008, has made a name for itself as an online platform for booking activities, guided tours and destination experiences designed for Spanish-speaking audiences. Now he wants to play another game: look beyond Europe and grow strongly in Latin America.
Look beyond Europe. After years consolidating its presence in Europe, Civitatis is preparing for a change of scale in its international expansion, with Latin America as a priority. The company frames it as a strategic step and also as a positioning adjustment: in an informative meeting prior to Fitur, its CEO, Andrés Spitzer, defended that the focus is not only on growth, but on truly integrating into the market. The goal, at least in his story, is for this growth to stop being peripheral and become central.
three levers. From there, the plan is based on three pillars. The first has to do with the United States: the company highlights the proximity to that market and the weight of the Spanish-speaking population as an opportunity for organic growth. The second is Brazil, where the company plans to grow by 30% in 2026, an objective that involves expanding the catalog also in Portuguese to better adapt to the country. And the third is more structural: in Latin America the wholesale channel, supported by distribution agreements with travel agencies, has more weight than in Europe, where direct sales to the end customer predominate.
Operating muscle. According to the data provided by the company, Civitatis already works with three regional centers in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, which function as a base to coordinate its activity on the continent. Together, these hubs concentrate 70 employees out of a total workforce of 360, according to the figures shared at the meeting prior to Fitur. The reading is clear: it is not just about selling in the region, but about building structure and teams on the ground to sustain growth.
The app as an inflection. The other major axis of the plan for 2026 does not have to do with the map, but with the product. The company is preparing the launch of a new mobile application with which it aims to stop behaving as a purely transactional platform and become a travel companion. Europa Press adds that the app would be designed to centralize reservations, itineraries and complementary services under a space called My Trips, with access even offline. The idea of relying on artificial intelligence to promote greater personalization also appears in that roadmap.
What exactly is Civitatis?. It is not a traditional tour operator, but a platform that brings travelers and local tour operators into contact, acting as an online reservation channel for activities and visits at the destination. Their proposal consists of bringing together this dispersed offer, presenting it in a digital catalog and managing the reservation from the same place, so that the user does not have to go supplier by supplier. This intermediation position also marks its limits and its opportunities: expansion does not depend only on opening the market, but on building a local catalog and making it accessible with the same product logic.
Grow cautiously. The expansion into Latin America and the launch of the new application also have a business reading: Civitatis maintains that its roadmap is based on sustainable profitability. It should be noted that the company does not currently have an IPO among its priorities, despite being in the full acceleration phase. And El País places the investment of Vitruvian Partners as a key piece, with 100 million euros in 2022 and another 50 million in a second operation two years later. From here, the game consists of combining global ambition with measured growth, without losing the ability to adapt to each local market.
Images | Laurentius Morariu | of the State
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