Travel start-up Triptease is continuing on its journey of helping hotels fill their rooms and travellers get better deals on their dream stay after raising $4m funding.
The money has come from its investors BGF and Notion Capital and rockets the total amount raised since last year to $13m.
The SaaS start-up helps hotels to get more direct bookings and increase their online conversion rate in the face of intense competition from online travel agencies.
Hotels around the world are anxious to avoid the large commissions paid to these online agencies but need tools to make sure that travellers complete bookings through their website.
The Triptease Direct Booking Platform integrates with a hotel’s own website and booking engine. Tracking millions of consumer booking journeys across thousands of hotel websites, it brings conversion optimisation to each individual hotel website.
The result is a smoother booking process and 20 per cent more people booking direct on a hotel website.
The new money from BGF and Notion Capital will be used to help build Triptease’s business in Asia, where the company opened a Singapore office last year.
Triptease will also continue to innovate its product, in particular by stepping up the roll out of its automated chatbot to more hoteliers.
At the same time the company is expanding its global leadership team having made a number of changes in the last few months, in order to step up its global expansion.
Richard Collins, the company’s first chief revenue officer, joined in March from Click Software, while Alexandra Zubko, co-founder and GM of the Americas, will become chief customer officer. A GM for the Asia Pacific region will be appointed shortly.
“We are delighted that our investors want to back us further in our bid to shift the world to direct bookings,” said founder and ‘chief Tease’ Charlie Osmond.
“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.
“Savvy consumers have also started to realise hotels prefer guests who book direct. Room upgrades and special incentives have become commonplace benefits for booking direct.”
The new funding will also allow Triptease to invest more in its highly successful Direct Booking Summit, one of the hospitality industry’s biggest events for hoteliers which takes place in different regions around the world three times a year.
The summits attract speakers from some of the biggest names in travel, tourism and technology. The next summit is being held in Amsterdam on 27 June, with representatives from Best Western, Google and Airbnb. Further summits will be held in Dallas in October and in Singapore in 2019.
Simon Calver, head of investments – ventures, at BGF, said: “Triptease is building its business around the world very rapidly.
“As consolidation takes place across the travel sector, there is a huge opportunity for Triptease to sell its software to hoteliers who really care about building a high quality business.
“As a patient capital investor BGF is excited about the long-term growth potential that travel offers for disruptive software businesses and we are very happy to provide Triptease with more capital as its expansion continues apace.”