Triptease, a London-based startup oriented around hotels has closed a $9 million Series B. It offers a SaaS solution to give assistance to hotels in order to increase direct sales and therefore generate more revenue. The new round was led by BGF Ventures, with existing investors Notion Capital and Episode 1 Ventures also participating.
Established in 2012, Triptease was founded on the premise that hotels can witness improvements in their direct selling by preventing online travel agencies (OTAs) and hotel booking aggregators, such as Booking.com and Expedia, claim the top of their profits by means of affiliate revenue. Charlie Osmond, the founder, spoke about the company’s overall mission:
We want to shift the world to direct bookings. A direct relationship with customers reduces a hotel’s spend on middleman commissions whilst allowing them to offer cutting-edge services like mobile check-in alongside ancillary upsells.
Price Check features as Triptease’s best-known product. It is a widget that is attached to hotel websites, displaying prices from across the web in real time.
The logic behind this is to reduce the uncertainty that surrounds a hotel’s direct price, ensuring that a potential customer doesn’t stray away to search elsewhere, and can instead book directly and with confidence. The startup has also expanded to include various other features built centered around the idea that hotels can do much more with their data, both individually and anonymously in aggregate, to ensure increased ability to compete with the OTAs. The company said:
By signing up to the Triptease platform, hotels with only a few thousand web visitors a month can learn from the millions of user sessions the company are tracking across the industry.
Triptease says that it will use the new inflow of funds to further its product development and to boost growth and international expansion, with special emphasis on Asia. The company also has a new office in Singapore in the pipeline, and is slated to double the headcount in its existing London and New York offices.
Rory Stirling, partner at BGF Ventures, said in a statement:
We are very excited to be joining Triptease as a new investor at a time when the company is showing great growth in the markets where it has established a presence. Now it’s time to expand the software to Asian hotels, to make this a truly global product. With consolidation amongst online travel agencies, hotels are increasingly looking for options to help them mobilise people to their own websites and Triptease is the best in its sector.
