July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Last-minute booking app HotelTonight is ready to alleviate your holiday headaches, be they travel or gift-related.

The company announced Tuesday that it’s now offering same-night stays in more markets, particularly Continental Europe, and giving the gift of convenience to people who want to buy a present in a pinch.

Two-year-old HotelTonight makes an extremely inviting iOS and Android app for booking same-night hotel stays on the cheap. The startup’s application has been downloaded more than 3.7 million times and is accessible to wanderlust-seekers in 72 cities across the world.

HotelTonight is adding Paris, Nice, Brussels, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Acapulco, and Calgary to its list of supported cities abroad. Stateside, HotelTonight is hitting the slopes with last-minute options in Lake Tahoe, Vail, and Breckenridge. The new markets are part of a refreshed application release that gives world travelers additional language options, including French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

“I think today’s announcement really speaks to our commitment to international expansion,” HotelTonight co-founder and CEO Sam Shank told VentureBeat. “Localizing the app was not an easy undertaking. It took months of careful work translating the app in the native language of each country and a full-team abroad working directly to bring on hotels.”

HotelTonight has made serving foreign markets its top priority ever since it closed a $23 million round of funding in June of this year.

The crop of new cities could turn out to be the gift of the season, at least for people who find themselves stranded while traveling this holiday season. The real gift, however, is the one you can now give to your adventurous friends and family members, as HotelTonight today released Gift Credits, its version of the gift card. You can purchase HotelTonight Gift Credits on the company’s website or via the apps, and you’ll get a pretty printable email that includes a promo code for redemption.

“We built Gift Credits to respond to a flood of customer requests asking for the ability to give the HotelTonight experience,” Shank said. “From a team standpoint, Gift Credits came from a one-day team hackathon here at HotelTonight headquarters.”

To date, the 80-person, San Francisco-based company has raised more $35 million in funding. First-time HotelTonight bookers can use the code “TONIGHT” to save $25 on their room purchase.

Photo credit: HGruber/Flickr

Beauty, brawn — and now brains.

The B-word almost perfectly explains why mobile-only hotel booking startup HotelTonight consumed the assets of PrimaTable, a company that helped exclusive restaurants forecast table vacancies and sell them to members of its private online club.

HotelTonight acquired PrimaTable for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced Wednesday. The buy, which has nothing to do with conquering a new industry, is all about perfecting HotelTonight’s approach to selling the perishable inventory (read: vacant rooms) of partner hotels.

“The irony of a simple, clean app is the sophistication and complexity of the systems that power it,” said HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank in a statement to VentureBeat. “By incorporating the forecasting and pricing tools that PrimaTable has built, we’ll make it even easier for hotels to sell their unfilled rooms. And for our customers, we’ll continue to focus on bringing them the right hotel at the right price when they need to book a room last-minute.”

Launched in January 2011, HotelTonight makes iOS and Android apps for booking same-night hotel stays at deep discounts. The startup has raised more than $35 million in funding; its applications have been downloaded more than 3 million times, and are accessible to fly-the-seat-of-their-pants types in 60 cities in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. But to eat up the growing same-day booking market, the company needs to perfect its demand forecasting abilities.

That’s where PrimaTable comes in. The startup made a members-only service for hard-to-get reservations at primo San Francisco and New York restaurants. The consumer-facing service was built on top of forecasting and pricing tools developed to help restaurants boost revenue. PrimaTable was a competitor to Savored, which Groupon just acquired.

The PrimaTable buy is HotelTonight’s first acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the entire PrimaTable team will join HotelTonight. PrimaTable cofounder and CEO Jamie Davidson will serve as HotelTonight’s vice president of product, and cofounder Colin Zima is becoming HotelTonight’s resident data scientist. Both PrimaTable cofounders previously worked at Google.

Hungry person image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

HotelTonight is making the spontaneity of booking last-minute lodging more practical for stay-cationers and world-travelers alike. The startup today released a new, more personalized version of its mobile-only booking app for iPhone and Android.

The two-year-old service lets people book same-night stays in snazzy or simple digs in 50 different markets. The company’s iOS and Android apps have been downloaded more than 3 million times since debuting in January 2011.

Tuesday, HotelTonight released version 4.0 of its app to improve the booking process and give people the best possible crunch-time hotel suggestions based on their preferences. The new features are contained within a refreshed user interface that includes larger hotel photos and an upgraded design.

“We’re always looking to help people find the right hotel … this [version] improves that experience by providing them with a better user interface, with more information about how many people have stayed [at a hotel] and liked it, but then also providing them with more relevant options for their particular needs,” CEO Sam Shank told VentureBeat. “It just makes HotelTonight more of an essential tool for the last-minute traveler.”

Previously, HotelTonight would present people with three hotel deals per city, per day. The company is keeping the same formula but offering people up to three bonus hotel options based on their likes, location, and past booking history. These additional hotel recommendations will be closer to a person’s exact location or include options that have been liked by HotelTonight bookers with similar tastes.

Additionally, the app now highlights exactly how many people have rated each hotel and shows off the percentage of those ratings that are positive.

“We’ve been collecting ratings from people after their stay … and we’ve been using that data to make sure our hotels are of the highest quality,” Shank said. “In this new release, we’ll be exposing that data and exposing those ratings.”

HotelTonight version 4.0 is available for iOS and Android devices. The app includes enhanced support for devices running Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean versions of the Android operating system.

San Francisco-based HotelTonight has raised more than $35 million in funding.

Photo credit: LOLren/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

HotelTonight is today giving fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants types 10 more reasons to book staycations or take last-minute trips. The mobile-only hotel-booking service is now offering people same-night hotel steals in five more U.K. cities and five new U.S. markets.

Launched in January 2011, HotelTonight helps people with iPhones, iPads, and Android devices book same-night stays in fancy, fashionable, or frugal lodgings. The apps have been downloaded more than 3 million times to date.

Each day at noon local time, HotelTonight users receive three hotel deals, offered at different price points, available that night. All prices are promised to be dramatically marked-down rates, as the startup works directly with its hotel partners to secure discounted pricing for empty inventory.

Starting today, the mobile-only service has hotel options in the U.K. cities of Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Liverpool and to folks wanting to plop their heads down on comfy pillows in the U.S. cities of St. Louis, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, and Nashville. Come early September, Manchester, U.K. and Salt Lake City will also be HotelTonight destinations. In total, HotelTonight now covers 50 markets.

The 10 new destinations are part of a carefully crafted international expansion plan fueled by $23 million in recent funding. In June, the company opened a small office in London and made its mobile booking app available to U.K. users in London for the first time. The single city U.K. launch, however, was just a tiny preview of the startup’s greater, world-takeover ambitions.

“Since our funding news and London launch in June, we’ve put a ton of energy and resources behind expanding HotelTonight overseas and stateside,” HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank told VentureBeat. “The team here works tirelessly to secure amazing deals every day and to continue to bring the HotelTonight experience to users across the globe.”

HotelTonight has raised more than $35 million in funding to date. The startup has offices in San Francisco and London and employs a 75 people.

Last-minute hotel booking is proving to be big business for HotelTonight, a one year-old San Francisco-based startup that just closed $23 million in additional funding.

Launched in 2011, HotelTonight makes elegant and easy mobile-booking applications for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices that surface the top three same-night hotel deals in a city each day at noon local time. The applications, which are light on choice but heavy on convenience, are currently available to customers in more than 40 markets across the U.S. and Canada, and have been downloaded more than two million times.

The young startup’s sizable $23 million round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) with participation from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, and First Round Capital. The funding will be used to hire aggressively, improve the mobile products, and ramp up international efforts, the company said.

“Our goal at HotelTonight is to revolutionize the way people shop for travel,” HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank said in a statement. “By building apps that allow users to easily book same-day hotel stays at great properties at incredible prices, we’re delivering on that mission.”

HotelTonight’s special sauce is its ability to solve the “I need a hotel room tonight” conundrum by featuring deeply discounted, same-night rates at high quality locales, all available to the mobile consumer up until 2 a.m. local time. The company works directly with hotels to ensure that rates are lower than rates offered by other hotel sites, and dramatically cheaper than regular stays. Hotels compete for exposure, as only the best three deals, as curated by the company, are shown to app users each day.

The new money, then, should come in handy as the company fights off competition from travel industry incumbents such as Priceline which have been quick to copy the same-night-only deal model of HotelTonight.

HotelTonight has raised $35.85 million in funding across three rounds since its 2011 launch, with early investors re-upping in the latest round. In conjunction with the raise, USVP general partner Rick Lewis is joining HotelTonight’s board of directors.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

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More times than not, hotel booking is a last minute affair, and it’s usually not much fun. But with a $15 billion hotel market, there’s a great opportunity for an app-maker that can make this process seamless and fun. HotelTonight may just be that app. Stylish and elegant, HotelTonight connects nearby consumers to boutique hotels with empty rooms.

“We’re setting out to be the next $1 billion company in travel,” HotelTonight co-founder and chief executive officer Sam Shank.

That’s a pretty bold claim for a company that specializes in a tiny niche of the hotel market. But merchants apparently like HotelTonight, because it helps them deal with the problem of “distressed inventory,” another way of saying a product that is getting close to its expiration date. You can’t sell yesterday’s empty hotel room to today’s traveler, but with HotelTonight the hotelier has a chance to push out a last-minute discount on rooms that would otherwise earn no money.

HotelTonight’s timing may be good, since more than 35 percent of travelers plan to book a hotel room on their mobile device in the next year, according to a study released by PhocusWright, a global travel market research company.

HotelTonight joins companies like WillCall for event tickets and appointment manager Schedulicity (which launched at DEMO ’11), that help merchants sell distressed inventory, which Shank calls the on-demand economy. It also competes with more established travel-booking sites like Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak and Hipmunk.

HotelTonight is expanding the market of potential hotel occupants, says Shank, rather than cannibalizing hotel profits by forcing them to offer discounts, a la Groupon. The app instead is targeting an affluent user base who can afford to stay in a hotel, but might not have even thought to do so. Part of the appeal is that HotelTonight doesn’t list every hotel in every city, just the cool ones, like New York’s Ace Hotel, or the Talbott Hotel in Chicago.

HotelTonight recently expanded its offerings to include Charleston, SC, which was recently listed as the top tourist destination in the U.S. The company is based in San Francisco, has 20 employees, and has raised $3.25 million from Battery Ventures, Accel Partners and First Round Capital.