iFood Is Now Selling Decolar Trips, and the Numbers Just Landed

Markets

Prosus has spent a fortune buying up Latin America’s consumer internet, and its latest results offer the first hard proof that stitching those companies together actually sells more.

Eighteen months ago the pitch was simple to say and hard to prove. Buy the region’s biggest food-delivery app and its biggest online travel agency, then get the tens of millions of people who order dinner to also book their holidays.

On June 29 the company behind that bet put a number on it. In its results for the year to the end of March, Prosus said about a fifth of the consumer revenue at its Brazilian travel brand now comes from people who arrived through the food app.

Who Prosus is, and why this matters

Prosus is the Amsterdam-listed arm of South Africa’s Naspers, one of the largest technology investors in the world and best known abroad for an early, era-defining stake in China’s Tencent. In Latin America its two crown jewels are iFood, the food-delivery app that dominates Brazil, and Decolar, the local name for Despegar, the region’s leading online travel agency.

It bought Despegar outright in a deal worth about one and seven-tenths billion dollars, closing in May last year and taking the company off the New York Stock Exchange. The logic was never just to own another business; it was to plug travel into the same daily habit that food delivery had already built.

That is the part most companies promise and few deliver. Cross-selling between apps sounds obvious, yet customers are stubborn, and a discount on a flight rarely tempts someone who opened their phone to order a pizza.

What the Prosus numbers actually show

The headline at Decolar is healthy on its own. Gross bookings, the total value of everything sold through the platform, rose twenty-nine percent to just under six billion dollars, with revenue of around eight hundred million dollars and a sixteen percent margin on adjusted earnings.

The more telling figure sits underneath. Decolar’s revenue growth in Brazil, its biggest market, sped up from six percent in the first half of the year to twenty-nine percent in the second, and the company credits the iFood loyalty link for much of that turn.

The cross-sell number is the one to watch — roughly twenty-one percent of Decolar’s consumer revenue in Brazil now comes from customers who earned loyalty points through iFood, a channel that barely existed before the integration began. Prosus has said iFood has around twenty-five times Decolar’s customer base, which is why it keeps calling the link an enormous runway rather than a finished job.

At group level the year was strong across the board. Ecosystem revenue rose fifty-seven percent to nine and seven-tenths billion dollars, adjusted earnings climbed eighty-four percent, and the company says it returned about forty-six billion dollars to shareholders through buybacks while lifting its dividend.

Why a foreign reader should care

For an investor in London or Munich, this is a rare data point in a debate that usually runs on faith. Super-app strategies, the idea of bundling food, rides, payments and travel into one loyalty web, are easy to announce and notoriously hard to bank, and here is one of the few cases where a buyer can show the bundle converting into sales.

It also reframes Brazil’s consumer-tech scene for outsiders who still picture it as a string of loss-making startups. The chief executive, Fabricio Bloisi, is a Brazilian who built iFood before rising to run the whole group, and his pitch is now an artificial-intelligence one, a “lifestyle ecosystem” that predicts and personalizes what each customer wants next.

That framing deserves a healthy dose of caution. The grand AI language is doing a lot of marketing work, and the genuinely persuasive evidence is mundane by comparison: a fifth of travel revenue arriving from a food app, and Brazil growth that quadrupled in pace over six months.

The honest caveat is that one good year is not a trend, and the easy gains from a fresh integration tend to come first. Whether the flywheel keeps turning, and whether rivals such as the Uber and iFood tie-up or new entrants blunt it, is the question the next set of results will have to answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Prosus and how is it linked to iFood and Decolar?

Prosus is the Amsterdam-listed technology arm of South Africa‘s Naspers, one of the world’s largest tech investors. It controls iFood, the food-delivery app that dominates Brazil, and Decolar, the local brand of Despegar, Latin America’s leading online travel agency, which it took private last year.

What did the latest Prosus results reveal about the iFood and Decolar tie-up?

In its results for the year to March, Prosus said about twenty-one percent of Decolar’s consumer revenue in Brazil now comes from iFood customers, and that Brazil revenue growth sped up from six percent to twenty-nine percent over the two halves of the year. Decolar’s gross bookings rose twenty-nine percent to just under six billion dollars.

Why does this matter to investors outside Latin America?

Super-app and cross-selling strategies are widely promised and rarely proven. These results are one of the few concrete cases of a food app feeding paying customers into a travel business, offering outside investors a real read on whether bundling consumer services actually drives sales rather than just slides.