July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Picking the right hostel can make or break your travel experience, and WeHostels wants to make sure you pick the accommodation that is right for you.

WeHostels is a mobile app for booking hostels and cheap hotels. Today, the startup revealed its latest update, which makes the app more friendly to people traveling in Europe. It is now available in German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as English, and updates prices accordingly in pounds and euros depending on your location. WeHostels also announced a partnership with German Ventures, which will provide capital as well as strategic and operational assistance to facilitate the company’s European expansion plans.

WeHostels is a useful solution for those backpackers and wandering souls who don’t like to plan ahead but also don’t want to wander the streets aimlessly or rely on guidebooks to find accommodations. Listings include more than 40,000 places in 800 cities. While traveling, you open the mobile app and search through available listings in your destination. Each listing contains additional practical information as well as photos, comments, pricing and an option to book.

Founder Diego Saez-Gil said the target market so far has been the U.S., but since launching in August, WeHostels has seen significant organic growth in Europe and Latin America, since those are major backpacker/budget-travel destinations. The startup is responding to this demand accordingly by refocusing attention toward international markets.

“In Europe, the travel market is huge for young people and we see a huge opportunity,” he said in an interview. “The larger vision for the company is to become the world’s largest mobile travel agency for young travelers, providing all the products and services that they need on-the-go. As a travel company, we have even more reasons to go global early. The big challenge with expanding internationally is that you have to understand the local culture when it comes to doing marketing, community management and customer support.”

Saez-Gil said American startups are increasingly looking abroad for expansion in the early stages. Companies like Uber, AirBnB, and HotelTonight have met with success outside of U.S. borders, and the infrastructure and web/mobile penetration numbers are growing quickly in international markets. WeHostels competitors include Priceline’s Booking.com, Hostelworld.com, Expedia’s Hotels.com, AirBnB, and Couchsurfing. WeHostel’s takes a mobile-first approach, which Saez-Gil said distinguishes it from competitors.

“Mobile growth is exponential in international markets and smartphones already outnumber PCs,” he said. “The travel industry is a huge market dominated by big players like Priceline, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, but it has been slow to innovate on mobile and provide great services to mobile users. We are the only company that is focused on mobile offerings for affordable accommodations.”

The company was founded after Saez-Gil traveled around Europe and continuously felt the need for a mobile service that could connect him with places to stay. Hostels can range from brightly-colored eccentric hubs where travelers come together to swap stories to seedy dark buildings filled with questionable sanitation and mysterious noises. He relied primarily on guidebooks and word-of-mouth to navigate, and he felt that there was a better alternative.

WeHostels first started out as a social network for cheap travel accommodation called InBed.me, which raised $1.2 million in seed financing. The company received high demand for a mobile offering and responded accordingly by going mobile-first. This decision paid off and WeHostels has grown its bookings by 778 percent since December. Along these same lines, today’s updates are also a result of user demand.

“Last year we saw the growth we were having on mobile queries, so we made a bold decision: let’s go mobile or go home,” Saez-Gil said. “Now we saw the potential of international markets so we made a new bold decision: let’s go global or go home.”

German Ventures will support WeHostels in adapting to international markets. WeHostels has plans to release iPad and Android apps this summer and will continue to add new currencies for South American and Asian countries as well. There are also plans to add more budget hotels into the listings and expand the Hot Trips feature which helps people hunt down housing during big events like SXSW, St.Patrick’s, and Coachella.

WeHostels is headquartered in New York with offices in Bogota or Munich.

Photo credit: WeHostels

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.

Chargerback made its public debut today, revealing its software that helps hospitality businesses automate the lost-and-found process to cut down on the amount of misplaced property. It’s like the St. Anthony of software.

CEO Ranson Webster said that most people don’t realize the enormity of the lost and found economy, but 46 million items are left behind each year in U.S. hotels. Chargerback’s platform makes it easier for guests and employees to report lost and/or found items and for staff members to match those reports with items in the database. It also generates notification email to staff members and guests when something is found, prints prepaid shipping labels, and tracks all of the items as they are claimed, unclaimed, and disposed of.

“Even today, most lost and found systems are manually run, burdening hotel staff and leaving travelers frustrated to the point they would give up trying to retrieve their lost item,” Webster said in an email. “Chargerback simplifies the system so businesses and leisure travelers alike have a single platform through which lost items are reported, logged, managed, matched and ultimately returned. Not only does this create smoother internal process for travel properties, but it also helps create a better customer experience.”

A survey by Wakefield Research found that the average cost of a lost item was $94. On average, travelers have lost 10 items outside of their homes, and 43 percent of people who have lost an item don’t take steps to retrieve it. Furthermore, 64 percent responded that they would think more positively of a travel establishment if it helped them retrieve a lost item.

It may not be rocket science, but for anyone who has ever lost a beloved family heirloom ring while on a trip (me), the idea of a stronger, more accountable, technology-based system helping to find it is something of a comfort.

Hotels clearly appreciate the customer service value. Chargerback is based in Reno, Nev., and so far has worked with spas, resorts, casinos, and hotels in Reno and Las Vegas. The platform is applicable though to any organization in the travel and leisure industry, including airports, cruise ships, amusement parks, convention centers, move theater, rental car companies, restaurants, and shopping malls.

What happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas, unless it is your personal property. That, you should bring back.

Photo Credit: gorbould/Flickr

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 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The founders of HotelTonight must have fancied an alpine ski vacation this winter, because today the popular app announced that is now available in Germany and Switzerland.

HotelTonight is a last-minute hotel booking app that connects travelers with available accommodation from their mobile phones. It is now available in 10 countries and over 80 destinations around the world. It also announced that it surpassed 4 million downloads.

Each day at noon local time, HotelTonight offers a new set of deals. If you find yourself without a place to stay in a strange city, simply launch the app and select the city, and it will present you with unsold rooms at steep discounts. Travelers can book the deal through their smart phones, and in no time at all, be staying comfort.

HotelTonight opened its doors in January 2011 and raised $23 million last June to promote global expansion. The San Francisco-based company has a strong U.S. presence and recently opened its European headquarters. In addition to Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the U.K., it is now active in Berlin, Munich, Zurich, and Geneva.

HotelTonight has also been busy updating the product. The 4.0 version of the iOS and Android apps debuted in September to provide travelers with more personalized recommendations based on their exact location, booking history, and feedback. These efforts have not gone unrecognized by users, venture capitalists, or the tech community. Apple named HotelTonight one of the most disruptive services of the year, and it received a Best E-Commerce Application nomination for the 2012 Crunchies Awards.

To help you find the perfect pillow, hotel metasearch engine Room 77 has raised $30.3 million in its third round of funding. New investor Expedia.com led this round.

Room 77 scours hundreds of web sources to find the best hotel deals. Users type in their destination, dates, number of people, and the system churns out the most relevant matches. Listings can also be viewed by other filters, such as price, star rating, user rating, and distance to specific locations. The results include information from other aggregation sites, like Priceline, Expedia, Orbitz, and Booking.com, and directs users to the specific site where they can find the best deal.

In addition to basic search requests, Room 77 also has data on information like room size, noise level, elevator proximity, and view. People with particular requirements, or who are just picky, can use the free Room Concierge service to pinpoint rooms that exactly match their needs.

Room 77 was founded in 2010 and previously raised $13.3 million. According to an SEC filing, this third round includes previous investors General Catalyst Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, CEO of Zillow Spencer Rascoff, as well as Expedia’s founder Rich Barton, former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford. Room 77 has raised $43.8 million to date.

Room 77 is based in Mountain View, Calif. Read the filing.