We’re pivoting! Our focus is now going to be personalized agentic AI for travel accommodation. If it exists, we can find it. If you have a requirement, we can find a match. When there’s a cheaper deal somewhere else, you guessed it, we’ll find it. Everyone wants to research before they go anywhere, we’re going to make that so easy you won’t ever want to plan trips without us.
What this means for guests is we’re about to launch a lot of awesome stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere else yet!
4 things are going to happen to our current platform:
- Agentic AI & travel planning is going to become our core service
- Our booking platform will be defocused and become a more boutique/premium service with a more limited selection of high-quality listings
- We will spin out some of the core functionality of our booking platform into hosted direct booking sites so hosts can easily set up their own site with better deals than OTAs
- Our PMS/automation/guest service features for hosts will become available under a simplified standalone subscription model, as well as for on-platform bookings and through direct booking sites
Where we went wrong before
We tried to build a better pure booking platform but faced a lot of challenges to adoption. We knew this would be hard but it turned out to be a nightmare. With more resources we could have made this work. As a small bootstrapped operation, we’ve been fighting the tide trying to build a 2-way marketplace and despite how hard we’ve worked, our progress has been slow.
One of our greatest problems has been in building confidence on both ends simultaneously: guests only want to use platforms with options and hosts only care about platforms that can provide them a steady stream of bookings. When the majority of your value comes from reaching a critical mass, that makes things super hard for a startup. As the original founder, that mistake is wholly on me.
I’m significantly more confident in our new direction, there’s an opportunity for us to build something truly disruptive here. I greatly appreciate the support from everyone to this day, and I hope you’ll continue to support me, and us, in building cool things.
I'm building the future of travel accommodation
