The mysterious rise of journey entrepreneur Robert Chamberlain

Few AFR Younger Wealthy Listers have had such meteoric and mysterious rises as journey entrepreneur, Robert Chamberlain. The founding father of the Huno Group bolted onto the Younger Wealthy Listing in 2019 with a web price of $55 million.

Chamberlain’s valuation then leapt to $253 million in 2020. This yr, Wealthy Listing editors Michael Bailey and Julie-Anne Sprague pinned Chamberlain’s wealth at $740 million, up from $320 million final yr, making him allegedly one of many richest folks in Australia below the age of 40.

The AFR claimed: “Chamberlain’s Huno Group, which runs a community of journey web sites. It referred greater than $1 billion in gross sales to its journey companions, serving to drive web revenue to $50 million in 2022. Its greatest markets are within the US and Britain.”

The AFR, quoting Huno’s web site, additionally mentioned: “Huno Group additionally holds residential property property in Australia and a portfolio of listed and unlisted equities, primarily within the journey and expertise sector.”

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The massive valuation positioned on Chamberlain and Huno appeared unusual, largely as a result of few folks seem to have ever heard of Huno or Chamberlain. We acknowledge the likelihood that Chamberlain could possibly be utilizing another firm title with ASIC that we aren’t conscious of.

The Wealthy Listing editors gave the impression to be warier of Chamberlain after we questioned his valuation again in 2020, noting: “Chamberlain’s predominant companies, Huno and AirfaresFlights, are within the hyper-competitive and comparatively low margin metasearch a part of the journey sector (metasearch is mainly internet affiliate marketing to ship visitors to on-line journey brokers and receives a commission a small fee).”

In September, earlier than the checklist was launched, Wealthy Listing editors advised your writer that Chamberlain offered them with monetary accounts indicating Huno’s vital profitability, however didn’t affirm whether or not these accounts had been formally audited.

Huno’s amateurish web site actually doesn’t add any credibility to Chamberlain’s claims, showing to have been created utilizing a low-quality web site builder within the late Nineteen Nineties. Similarweb noted that the location had solely 16,000 visits in September — Hotelscombined, which was offered in 2018 for US$140 million, had 2.1 million visits.

Huno’s web site, which doesn’t seem to have been up to date for a number of years, claims that it “reached a Hitwise high 10 journey place in Australia and featured main on-line journey brokers as companions together with Flight Centre, Travel.com.au, Lastminute, Wotif and Expedia. At this time the enterprise helps a whole lot of tens of millions of travellers world wide seek for their best lodging throughout a community of over 50 journey websites and model”. Huno doesn’t title any of the 50 journey websites.

Chamberlain’s on-line presence seems minimal – his LinkedIn web page refers to solely Huno and a short stint at PwC in 2006, and he final posted three years in the past. Chamberlain’s Twitter account is never used, boasting solely 25 followers. Chamberlain’s solely reference to Huno on Twitter was in 2021, the place he claimed “18 years since Huno began. Again then it took 3 months to get to a thousand guests. This yr can be a whole lot of tens of millions. Loopy.”

Unusually, ASIC doesn’t seem to notice the existence of any entity referred to as Huno or Huno Group, nonetheless, it does refer to a different of Chamberlain’s earlier companies, Airfares Flights Pty Restricted.

The AirfaresFlights.com.au web site is one other horrible-looking web site that seems to have been hacked collectively within the late Nineteen Nineties and refers to one more web site, Hotelsguides.web, which is not operational.

AirfaresFlights Fb web page hasn’t been touched since 2015 with the location and largely consists of random feedback and posts from disgruntled customers. AirfaresFlights has by no means disclosed any monetary reviews to ASIC — given its alleged scale (the Wealthy Listing valuation was based mostly on Chamberlain’s declare that the enterprise made $50 million revenue final yr), this would seem to breach ASIC reporting necessities which calls for that firms with income of greater than $50 million and property in extra of $25 million should lodge monetary reviews with ASIC yearly.

We tried to contact Chamberlain on the telephone quantity listed on Huno’s web site and through electronic mail, however obtained no reply. We additionally contacted the AFR to request they disclose the monetary reviews it relied on when figuring out Chamberlain’s wealth estimate, but additionally obtained no reply.

It’s usually mentioned that one ought to attempt to get wealthy and stay nameless — Chamberlain actually fulfilled the second criterion.

Disclosure: The writer is the co-founder and CEO of Luxurious Escapes, a Melbourne-based journey firm, and in addition a director of Personal Media, the writer of SmartCompany.