Hospitality and travel startups continue to roll out in a seemingly unending supply. What once was a tough market for some technology and entrepreneurial franchise, the travel niche is now “wide open” to new and profitable ideas. Here’s a short list of five recent startups making investment and innovation waves in the travel space.
GuestViews offers “real-time” experience and data
GuestViews
Billed as a “real-time customer knowledge for physical venues”, GuestViews is a French startup actually founded back in 2013. The company began as a new take on leveraging the sharing economy and on expanding the whole “guest experience” into a “client experience” value proposition. Today, GuestViews has metamorphosed into a customizable application for tablets that gleans customer intelligence not just for hotels, but what visitors think of cultural places such as museums, and even shops.
Founded by Alizée Doumerc and Camille Caubrière, the startup offers a new experience to visitors of the cultural institutions, hotels, and stores through a digital guest book. In turn, these same entities glean valuable insight into their clitentele via the GuestRoom CRM analysis and projection aspect or dashboard. The startup has managed to secure partnerships with the likes of the Louvre, the Pantheon and the MuCEM, to name a few. The only big hurdle I see for this innovative little company is scaling up to expand to bigger markets outside Paris. The business model of annual subscription is sound, but I’m skeptical of enough high-end business in the French market being sufficient to float such a service. As far as I can tell, the startup is so far self-funded and self-sufficient.
The Getabed landing page
Getabed
Yeah, you read that correctly. Getabed is somehow a brilliant name for a last-minute accommodations service. The innovative service founded by Mauricio Madrigal and Alex Galindo is a booking platform for hotels with rooms for budget travelers primarily. The Guadalahara company offers rooms in some 200 plus hotels in 20 Mexican cities so far. The startup’s CEO has said his company’s biggest target initially will be the Millennial crowd prone to hook up with last minute digs across Mexico.
To be more precise, Getabed is a marketplace that connects hotels with available inventory and budget travelers who will be staying from 9pm to 9am without amenities. Travelers get to customize and personalize their experience by adding only the things they want or need, in more-or-less an airlines model of a la carte menu selection. So far the startup has secured seed funding in the amount of $440,000. Like the GuestViews startup above, Getabed is a great idea only incumbered by its current limited market in Mexico.
NextMenu
I’ve actually waited on a startup like NextMenu for some time. With a bit of restaurant experience under my belt, I know intimately how badly many operations need better efficiency. This tool is being rolled out by Next Generation Interactive (NGi), a new company founded by Tibor Barna, a Swiss entrepreneur who is a tech ops and IT guru for the banking sector. As for what NextMenu can do, the short version may be turning Barna into a billionaire. The promotional video above is a bit salesy, but it does capture the essence of this massive resteraunteur point of pain.
I was happily surprised when I visited NextMenu’s site, and this does not happen all that often for tech analysts. The simple premise of this restaurant pain solver is this. The app Barna is creating is a branding and marketing tool, rolled into a talking menu that communicates to your kitchen, alongside a payment method that frees customers from the pain and agony of waiting on the check. The app even hails your waiter if your beer mug is empty or if there is a fly in your soup. Staff are “reminded” of a guest’s wants and needs via a cool communications interface. The startup was nominated for the Restaurant Tech Innovation Award 2016, but I’m a bit puzzled by the fact nobody’s come forward to invest in a brilliant idea like this? Anyway, the interactive menu bonded to staff communication device, and combi-mobile point of sale is brilliant and simple. In short, a restaurant management helper with immense potential.
RoomChecking landing page
RoomChecking
Another management assistant of immense potential, RoomChecking helps hoteliers optimize housekeeping and maintenance via a smart operational platform. Everything from assigning housekeeping staff based on such things as workload, to maintenance personnel getting real-time alerts empowers managers and staff alike. The simple take on RoomChecking is in its ability to deliver a customizable workflow and efficiency solution.
Launched back in 2012, the Paris startup has bootstrapped into a self-supporting business model with several key hotel brands onboard. Only recently the company founded by Emile Lugassy and current CEO Jonathan Weizman snagged an $800k plus seed round from Astotel Group, BPI services, and Mauriece Hurrand Hotels. Once part of the Microsoft Ventures Paris startup programme, RoomChecking’s hurdle seems to be like some others. For a startup dependent on hotels, markets outside the current French one would seem mandatory. Perhaps this seed funding will fascilitate growth abroad. I like RoomChecking for its pragmatic approach to hotel efficiency.
One thing HotelMate could use is better signage
HotelMate
This startup is one of the most intriguing I’ve seen in some time. While HotelMate seems to have begun from a somewhat flawed premise, founder Themis Anthrakopoulos has hit on a vast untapped potential I’ll explain here. Founded back in March of 2016, HotelMate is essentially an auxiliary booking channel that taps into the guest potential of employees and their families. Billed as a “commission free” channel to counterbalance OTA commissions, the Lausanne startup does have great potential.
HotelMate in its current form is an incentive based employee networking idea. In my view it’s also an open door into a rather vast revenue boost for certain hotels. The problem for me is, offering hotel employees 10% off is not going to get it adaptation wise – hotel people can get stays dirt cheap as it is. What could make HotelMate a multimillion dollar bonanza for Anthrakopoulos, is selling hoteliers on the untapped potential of employee networks. HotelMate offers discounted rooms at member hotels to full and part-time hotel employees. But what if staff could “earn” free stays for truly evangelizing these hotels? In our business getting hotels to empower and leverage their staff is one of the biggest disasters in marketing possibility. Getting a desk clerk to “tweet” their hotel’s deals is not ever done, let alone putting in place a “system” for empowering a network of evangelists. If Anthrakopoulos or another entrepreneur invents that – there’s the billion dollar idea of the week!