Anyone who has ever stayed at a hotel knows it to be true: not all rooms are created equal. Even if they’re in the same price range, on the same floor and look the same way in a catalog, minor deviations in layout and location can make a difference.
To all those travelers with an eye for detail, this startup has you covered.
Room 77, a search engine for personalized hotel room recommendations, announced Thursday that it has raised $10.5 million in a Series B round led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from existing institutional and angel investors PAR Capital Managment, Sutter Hill Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Rich Barton (founder of Expedia and Zillow) and Erik Blachford (former president of IAC travel).
Notably, the Series B was oversubscribed: originally, Room 77 was only looking to raise about $5 million. The round brings the startup’s total raised to $13.5 million.
Launched as a public beta in February, Room 77 empowers users to search for hotel rooms based on the most specific of criteria, from square footage to bed type to distance from elevator and beyond. Ideally, the startup is able to rank rooms based on each traveler’s specific preferences, so that no one has to scour looking for the room that suits them best.
Users can even see what their window view looks like, based on data available from Google Earth.
“The first generation of hotel search focused on bringing hotels from offline to online," said Brad Gerstner, founder and chairman of Room 77. "Our aim is take hotel search to the next level by empowering travelers with more information and transparency to find the right hotel and the best room."
Room 77 will use the new funding to bolster its global index of hotel rooms and to further develop its search engine online and for mobile. Right now, that means indexing every hotel with three or more stars the whole world over, which comes to around 25,000 properties. So far, Room 77 has indexed over 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties in 24 markets, the majority in the U.S.
The service is currently available on the Web and iPhone, with an Android app slated for summer release.
