GuestDriven Raises $3M To Expand Its Hotel Guest Interaction And Loyalty Platform
February 18, 2014
TechCrunch: GuestDriven Raises $3M To Expand Its Hotel Guest Interaction And Loyalty Platform
These days, many hotel interactions with their guests happen through third-party platforms: The Travelocities, Yelps, and Foursquares of the world get the feedback that hotels need and depend on, and this generally happens in a public forum. One-to-one interaction and the direct relationship between hotel and guest has fallen somewhat by the wayside in a web-based, connected world. Montreal-based GuestDriven wants to help put the guest relationship back in the hands of the hotel, and today announced a $3 million Series A to help its platform accomplish that.
GuestDriven offers hotels a platform that provides real-time guest interaction, allowing businesses to send them messages, tips, perks and loyalty benefits before, during and after their stay. The startup calls it a “Guest Relationship Management platform,” and it’s designed to provide hotels with the kind of actionable data they need to identify what’s working for their business, and what isn’t. It also helps hotels manage guest relationships down to the level of each individual, as well as identify key social influencers among their customers and reward them for broadcasting positive messages about their stay on social networks.
“Most reservations come in from third-party products, and those products don’t provide CRM data points for the hotels,” explained GuestDriven CEO and co-founder Anthony Zebrowski in an interview. “There’s a mass push on price that becomes the determining factor of where you’re booking. At the same time there are 12-14 different IT systems on the hotel side that lack any ability of talking to each other, so there’s no real CRM or contextualization.”
Already, GuestDriven is being used in around 115 hotels, but the company wants to expand in a big way and focus on the U.S. market, and that’s where this funding comes in. The round is led by PlazaCorp, Real Ventures and Structure Capital. Previous investors include strategic investors from the hospitality tech world including Joe Poulin from Luxury Retreats and Peter Kern, who sits on Expedia’s board of directors. With it, GuestDriven plans to expand its salesforce to drive its push, as well as hire additional engineers and other personnel.
A direct line of communication is a valuable tool for hotels looking to strengthen their relationship with guests and build return customers, but the data play is the bigger story here. Much of the modern travel industry is moving towards a model where access to customer data is held by third-party platform providers, but GuestDriven wants to put that info back in the hands of hoteliers themselves, which is a tempting carrot indeed in terms of what it offers for trend analysis and both short- and long-term strategic planning.
About GuestDriven
GuestDriven is a mobile guest engagement platform for the hospitality industry that enables guests to engage directly with hotels via their mobile devices. The software-as-a-service platform provides hoteliers with valuable information about their guests’ preferences and behaviors, which they can leverage to offer personalized perks, promotions and rewards to elevate the guest experience and increase revenues. GuestDriven helps hospitality brands build customer advocacy, providing deep, actionable insights into guest preferences and behaviors in real-time, with a suite of integrated tools for targeting, campaigning, and interacting with the guest at each and every stage of travel. To date, GuestDriven has implementations in over 35 cities. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in Montreal, Canada.
About Plaza Ventures
Plaza Ventures invests in early stage technology companies with a unique model that pools high net worth capital with corporate and institutional capital. The investment focus is to bridge the gap between Seed and Series A funding for promising, high-growth Canadian companies in enterprise software, mobile internet and digital media. The Plaza team and its investment partners actively assist in building enterprise value and delivering positive liquidity outcomes.
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