EURAM is bankrupt, Vincent Hekkert (Business Development Director) confirms to TravMagazine. Users of the system have been seeing the notification about the bankruptcy in the system since the end of the afternoon. Hekkert, who has been active at EURAM since 2010, tells TravMagazine that he wants to look back on the events. Hekkert recently spoke extensively in an interview with TravMagazine about the developments at EURAM, which was going to develop more as a technology company. ‘But EURAM Creative Packaging and TripSpark remain important spearheads.’ Peter Keijers, founder and CEO of EURAM in 1990, retired at the beginning of this year after about 30 years.
TravMagazine reported at the time: ‘Carmen Dils (COP), Tom Allard (CTO) and Vincent Hekkert (CCO) doubled their shares in EURAM to now reach 41 percent together. I can’t think of a better example of confidence in the company’s future. Guy Devos, who had been a member of the advisory board and then the board of directors for six years, decided to acquire 10 percent shares.’ In a first reaction to TravMagazine Belgium, Keijers said: ‘After intense discussions in recent months with various takeover candidates and the withdrawal of the last candidate last Tuesday evening, the board of directors of Euram has filed for bankruptcy. This afternoon, the Commercial Court declared Euram bankrupt. Thus, the company ceases to exist. Sad news, first and foremost for all the great people who work there and a great product that is being lost.’ The notification when logging in to EURAM that is in the possession of TravMagazine indicates that the bankruptcy will be handled by trustee Ilse Van De Mierop. The trustee’s email address is ilse.vandemierop@dlapiper.com. Euram is the brainchild of Peter Keijers. The company started in 1990 as a specialist in America, in the early years from an apartment on the Keizershof in Leuven. From the beginning, a lot of information was sent to the travel agent, via paper books. With the rise of the internet, they quickly chose to be one of the first on the market to invest in an online approach, which resulted in different versions of the Dino software. In the past decade, there has been a resolute focus on technology. In 2022, just after the pandemic, EURAM, was on the verge of rolling out its revolutionary Planisto platform to the broad travel market. The platform has been offered to suppliers, tour operators, OTAs and travel agents and allows complete trips to be put together for the end consumer, which can also be booked immediately. EURAM was actively looking for external investors to broadly scale and market the Planisto platform. EURAM was a Belgian company with two products: EURAM Creative Packaging and Planisto. EURAM Creative Packaging is a B2B solution for creating tailor-made trips and had customers in France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium. Planisto or the Planisto Travel Platform is the technology developed by EURAM that could be used by almost all stakeholders in the travel sector as Platform as a Service (PaaS).
