July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When you find yourself without a place to stay, HotelTonight helps you find one. Today, the last-minute hotel booking app released an update that seeks to give customers added confidence in their booking, as well as convenience.

‘Snap Your Stay’ is a new review feature where customers can post personal photographs from their stay. Once at the hotel, visitors open the app and are prompted to take a series of photos of the bed, bathroom, view, lobby etc… Once completed, the photos can be edited within the app itself, which even contains light filters (so you won’t need to open Instagram). The images are shareable on social media and will be available as part of the hotel’s profile in the app.

Popular travel sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are based on user-generated reviews that are [in theory] less biased than branded content. All the hotels on HotelTonight are currently profiled with custom photography. Snap Your Stay will add a layer of accountability and engagement by allowing customers to share what the experience was really like.

“It’s clear that people are excited about sharing information to help other travelers make informed decisions about where to stay,” said founder and CEO Sam Shank to VentureBeat. “With this new release, HotelTonight has reinvented the hotel review for the mobile age. We’ve taken something that is typically very time-intensive and done after your trip concludes, and made it fun, visual, mobile-friendly and something you do during your trip.”

Shank used to work for a travel review site called TravelPost and said he wanted to incorporate hotels reviews into HotelTonight in a way that made sense for the last-minute, mobile user. Combined with the new Price Guarantee feature, he said travelers will have more information and peace of mind when booking rooms at the last minute. The Price Guarantee feature means that HotelTonight will guarantee its rates against competitors offerings, so people don’t need to worry about missing the best deal.

HotelTonight launched in 2011 and is now available in 12 countries and over 100 destinations around the world with more than 2500 hotel partners. Each day at noon local time, HotelTonight offers a new curated set of hotel deals. If you need a hotel room on-the-fly, you open the app, enter your destination, and it will present you with unsold rooms at steep discounts that can be booked on your smartphone.

The company released version 4.0 in September 2012 with more personalized recommendations based on their exact location, booking history, and feedback. Since raising $23 million in June 2012, HotelTonight accelerated global expansion and added German and Swiss destinations. Shanks said this is evidence of HotelTonight’s role as a “mobile commerce trail blazer.”

“We’re innovators in the space,” Shank said. “In fact, we invented the category of last minute hotel booking apps. We’re hyper-focused on mobile travel, and today’s news speaks to our commitment to innovate and continuing pushing the boundaries.

HotelTonight is based in San Francisco, California with a recently opened European headquarters. The company has raised over $35 million to date and is available on iOS or Android for free in English, Spanish, German, Italian, and French.

Hotel booking site Ostrovok has locked up $25 million to become the top Internet travel company in the Russian-speaking world.

Ostrovok is a straightforward hotel search engine. Users enter in their search destination, dates of travel, and number of people. The system brings up relevant results, which can be filtered by price, rating, location, and features like Internet, free breakfast, and parking. The database contains more than 135,000 hotels in 200 countries around the world.

Over the past year and a half, Ostrovosk has signed direct agreements with nearly 5,000 hotels in the Russian-speaking world and claims to be the leading online hotel network in this region. With $25 million, the plan is to sign over 25,000 new hotels, continue developing new products, and attract as many users as possible from the 300 million people in the Russian-speaking world.

“The persistence, commitment, and strategic vision of the team have allowed them to create a successfully developing company,” said well-known investor Yuri Milner, who participated in this round.

Online travel is a hot space in Russia. Some of the biggest deals to emerge from this market involve flight and hotel booking, including Oktogo.ru which recently raised $11 million and was named one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world by Fast Company, and Onetwotrip which stowed away $16 million last October.

This second round of financing makes Ostrovok, which means ‘island,’ the “best-capitalized online travel company in Russia.” General Catalyst Partners led the round, with participation from Frontier Ventures, Accel Partners, Expedia CEO Eric Blachford, Shervin Pishevar, and others. This prestigious lineup of investors were attracted to the potential in the fast-growing Russian market, as well as the site’s traction and team.

As Dave McClure put it, during a conference in Moscow last year, “The market looks pretty fucking good in Russia for the next 10 years. So the future is fucking bright! Time to buy sunglasses!” Russians can wear those same sunglasses on the trips they book through Ostrovok.

Photo Credit: jronaldlee/Flickr 

GetYourGuide is a website that helps people search for, find, and book tours, attractions, and activities in advance. Today, it announced it was putting $14 million into its fanny pack to expand to its database of things to do and enter new markets.

Figuring out what to do in a foreign country can be challenging and stressful. You’ve got language barriers and innumerable offline options, and traditional guidebooks are often limited or out of date in what they suggest. As a result, the online travel space is heating up right now as startups like Viator, Peek, and Vayable take a stab at facilitating “experiences” while Gogobot and Trippy take a social approach to trip planning.

GetYourGuide’s approach to this market is to collect and index tours, along with ratings, cost, and customer reviews. It has aggregated more than 16,900 activities in more than 1,680 destinations around the world, and it has distribution partnerships with more than 1,000 online travel agonies such as TripAdvisor and Kayak.

“We realized that there were a lot of suppliers who didn’t sell their tours online and a huge demand coming from travelers, to actually have access to this a great offer of tours and attractions worldwide,” said CEO Johannes Reck in an email interview. “We have a two-sided marketplace with a consumer front-end and a supplier reservation system, which lets the whole range of travel activity suppliers upload and self-manage their inventory. This has allowed us to grow the world’s largest inventory in under two years.”

Spark Capital and Highland Capital led this first round of funding, which the company cites as one of the largest Series A investments raised by a European tech startup. GetYourGuide has offices in Zürich, Berlin, and Las Vegas.

Update 10/24/2012 – (12:10 p.m. PT): Someone pointed out that the $117 million amount mentioned in Airbnb Form D filing is actually an update to the company’s $112 million round that was initially reported in July 2011. (See the full update at the bottom of the page.)

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Social bed and breakfast startup Airbnb has secured a long-rumored giant round of $117 million in funding, according to an SEC Form D issued today.

Airbnb helps people rent out portions of their homes, apartments, or other unoccupied spaces as if they were bed and breakfasts. The company gives its uses tools to list all amenities, keep track of booking guests, and even insures the living space from damage. It’s become a vastly popular alternative to hotels for people who travel, especially during music festivals, conventions, and the like.

Back in June, the company reported that a total of 10 million people had used the service since it launched in 2008.

Its unclear exactly who invested in the new round. Billionaire Peter Thiel may have invested a large chunk of change in Airbnb, as VentureBeat previously reported. The new funding could boost Airbnb’s valuation to more than $2 billion. (The company’s last big round was $112 million in 2011, which put it into the billion-dollar valuation club.)

Founded in 2008, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $230 million in funding to date from Andreessen Horowitz, DST, General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, and others.

Update 10/24/2012 – (12:10 p.m. PT): Someone pointed out that the $117 million amount mentioned in Airbnb Form D filing is actually an update to the company’s $112 million round that was initially reported in July 2011. Airbnb did, however, file the Form D late.

“Technically the Form D should have been filed 15 business days after the first sell of the B. This would not be their first time (for Airbnb) to file something late,” said VCExperts Direction of Business Intelligence Justin Byers, who pointed out our mistake. “(Airbnb) had a forward split (1 to 4) that can be seen between Restated Cert filings on 4/29/2010 and 11/03/2010, but the “Certificate of Correction” filed showing the amendment and the split was not filed until 7/18/2011, after the split was represented in new.”

We’ve reached out to Airbnb for further clarification about the funding (as well as why the Form D was filed late), and will update this post with any new information.

Update #2 – (12:48 p.m. PT): An Airbnb spokesperson responded to VentureBeat with the following statement:

Airbnb filed a Form D today with the Securities and Exchange Commission covering the company’s issuance of shares of its preferred stock as a part of its Series B financing, which initially closed over a year ago, on July 22, 2011. Today’s filing was a customary notification related to the company’s prior Series B financing, and is unrelated to any other financing that the company may choose to undertake in the future.

The spokesperson didn’t comment about why the Form D was filed late, or if the startup is seeking a fresh round of funding.

Woman lying on a bed of money photo via Jason Stitt/Shutterstock

That’s up 50 percent from last year, and it represents 8,100 companies booking 47,000 meetings. The company still has room to grow: Its event-booking system includes more than 200,000 hotels and venues worldwide.

I spoke with CEO Reggie Aggarwal in June just after the company’s Seed Labs acquisition, when he told me that Cvent was “the walking dead” from 2001 to 2005 after a high-flying dot-com bust. The company has battled hard since 2005, building itself into “the number one marketplace for group meetings.”

One of the company’s key competitive advantages is technology that helps both meeting planners and hotels quickly create and respond to requests for a quote. The goal: faster, frustration-free event selection.

Cvent vice president Bharet Malhotra says the company has ”invested heavily in technology revisions and trained tens of thousands of hotel employees with a goal of making the request-for-proposal response process a very manageable process of responding in just minutes.”

In mid-2011, Cvent announced a monster $136 million round of funding that has helped the company expand quickly and make strategic acquisitions. At that time, an IPO was not on the table — at least not for another six months, Aggarwal said.

One has to wonder if now, with growth like this and press releases being sent out to ensure the world knows, Cvent is starting to think about going public.

With Palo Alto Network jumping 31 percent and Kayak seeing a nice bump on opening day as well, perhaps the time is getting to be right.

Losevsky Photo and Video / Shutterstock.com