Payam Zamani bought about half of Inspirato in 2024 and is now the CEO. (Max Scheinblum/BusinessDen)
Inspirato is getting a new travel buddy.
The Denver-based luxury vacation company is combining with Buyerlink, a digital marketing firm also owned by Inspirato CEO Payam Zamani.
The deal values the privately held Buyerlink at $326 million, filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show. At the end of trading Wednesday, publicly-traded Inspirato was worth $47 million at $3.75 per share.
The two will collectively be listed under the name One Planet Platforms once the deal closes, which Zamani said is expected in the third quarter.
There will be no layoffs at Inspirato and Denver will remain its headquarters, according to Zamani, who took control of the business last August.
“The companies are complementary but don’t do the same thing,” Zamani said. “Categorically, I don’t have any questions about layoffs. We’re past that. Inspirato is not the same company it was when I joined 10 months ago.”
But Zamani said Inspirato will shift from a “country club” model towards being an online marketplace of luxury travel, using Buyerlink’s years of marketing research and along with artificial intelligence capabilities.
“Buyerlink is able to spend about $60 million a year in digital marketing and do that effectively and properly at scale,” he said. “You could just imagine what a company like Inspirato could do with the access.”
Most of Inspirato’s 11,600 members are part of the $6,000-a-year Club level, which opens them to its network of luxury vacation homes. On each trip, the company provides on-site concierge, daily housekeeping and pre-trip custom itineraries for its travelers, who still pay a nightly rate.
Zamani said those homes, along with experiences currently only offered to Inspirato members, could open up to non-members as part of the transition. The company tried something similar two years ago when it began listing some properties on Airbnb. But Zamani said that practice was unsuccessful and ended before he came on last August.
Zamani owns a little over half of Inspirato, which brothers Brent and Brett Handler founded in 2011. The company says it has cut $40 million in annual expenses since he took over, including by ending unprofitable leases and reducing headcount
Once it’s folded into Buyerlink, his family office One Planet Group will be the controlling shareholder of the newly formed entity. Zamani said he was not involved in the deal on the Inspirato side to avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Buyerlink told the SEC it did $125 million in revenue in 2024 — flat from 2023 but up 35% from 2022. It made $27 million in EIBITDA last year, which was more than the $21 million it did in 2023 and the $11 million it made in 2022, filings show.
Before the deal was announced, Inspirato said it anticipated to tally between $235 million and $255 million in sales in 2025, a decrease from the $280 million it made in 2024. The company posted $1.6 million in profits in the first quarter, its first since a $87.5 million initial public offering in 2022.
“Buyerlink has been really a very solid successful company for a while, and it was considering doing a public offering,” said Zamani, who founded the business as Reply.com in 2001 before changing the name in 2015.
He said the 230-employee Buyerlink has been operating in its current form for the last five or so years. Home services and the automotive sectors account for a lion’s share of its revenue.
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