Hotel operations and concierge startup Porter & Sail has build a consumer-facing mobile app for guests at luxury hotels.
Hotels prompt their guests to download the app, which offers travel guide content from local experts, such as the musician Moby providing tips on exploring LA.
The app came out of testing this winter. It has been adopted by more than 40 premium properties. Hotel partners include Soho Beach House in Miami, Viceroy, Sydell Group, the Único Hotel Group, Unlisted Collection, and The Zetter properties in London.
By year-end, the app is on track to be used by more than 100 hotels.
Guests are cumulatively averaging half-an-hour in the app, per trip, the New York-based company says.
The company's analytics tools enable hotels to use the app's data to learn more about their guests. The software strives to provide actionable insights for operations staff.
Guest spending and preferences, previous stays, social demographics, and trip purpose can be collected. Guests can also use the app to request restaurant reservations and other concierge services from the hotel.
Here is a one-minute video pitch from co-founder Caitlin Zaino:
Here's a brief Q&A with Zaino:
What problem does your business solve?
Hotels are struggling with digital inefficiencies that are undermining market share and growth. Online travel agencies and short-term rentals undermine revenue, undercut the hotel’s ownership over their guest, and leverage technology to claim the once-loyal hotel guest.
Porter & Sail solves these problems through providing hospitality-friendly, digital tools that empower hotels to reclaim ownership over their guest -- enhancing their long-term value and driving premium revenue streams.
Through implementing Porter & Sail, hotels increase touch-points with their guests, connecting directly and meaningfully with them from booking to checkout, thereby augmenting satisfaction, on-property spend, peer-to-peer referrals and direct bookings.
Our products capture unprecedented business intelligence that, for the first time in industry, allows the hotels to understand who their guest is and serve them more effectively to drive repeat and direct bookings.
Names of founders, their management roles, and number of full-time paid staff?
Porter & Sail’s co-founders are Caitlin Zaino (CEO) and Deepak Shrivastava (COO/CFO). We have 13 full-time paid staff, with 2 new hires in the pipeline.
Zaino formerly founded the food discovery platform, The Urban Grocer, which was sold as a television special to Cooking Channel.
Shrivastava previously covered casino gaming and hospitality at Morgan Stanley.
Additional team members have hailed from Dropbox, Travelocity, Amazon, Yahoo!, Travel + Leisure, Paramount Pictures, and BBC Worldwide.
Funding arrangements?
Porter & Sail closed a seed round in late 2015 and has raised about $2 million total, to date, in committed seed capital from strategic, institutional, and angel investors.
Investors include the Singapore-based Philean Capital, Onlan Capital Ventures, and Reese Schonfeld, the co-founder of CNN and Food Network. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts industry veteran Susan Helstab also recently joined the Advisory Board.
Revenue model?
We employ a B2B-subscription-based model. Hotels pay an annual fee in exchange for access to our suite of products, including our guest-facing mobile concierge app, operational dashboard, and guest analytics.
Why do you think the pain point you’re solving is painful enough that customers are willing to pay for your solution?
Where direct bookings are 3-5x more profitable than OTA bookings, and achieving paramount RevPAR is key to profitability, hotels must compete digitally.
This is where Porter & Sail comes in. The hotels that we work with are phenomenal at delivering extraordinary guest experiences. They are not, however, technology companies – and they don’t need to be. But they do need to understand how to meaningfully play in a digital era, with an ever-changing, ever-mobile guest who is increasingly booking, planning and interacting on their mobile.
External validation?
Leland Kwee, Director of Pontiac Land Private Limited, is on our Board of Directors; long-time Four Seasons CMO, Susan Helstab, sits on our Advisory Board.
Press coverage has ranged from Monocle, to the New York Times, Wallpaper*, Cool Hunting, Luxury Daily, A Hotel Life, and elsewhere.
Tnooz view:
Several companies have attempted to build white-label apps for independent and small chain hotels. But a key failing is that their apps haven't been compelling enough for guests to use.
Porter & Sail seems to have solved that problem. It says its mobile app is so compelling that guests average 7 minutes per app session, with 28.8 screens viewed per session.
The posh Monocle-style interface and the carefully curated, time-sensitive insider content seems to be well suited to the types of guests patronizing upscale, independent hotels.
This category of hotels is under-resourced when it comes to digital tools, relative to major hotel chains and global technology companies. Porter & Sail's system could help them gain an edge in digital marketing.
Given its appeal to a high-end market, Porter & Sail could deliver solid and consistent margins and be adopted by thousands of properties globally.
But there might be a limit on how far the company could scale. There's a cap on the number of travelers who fly Lufthansa Senator class, like to shop in Tokyo's Tomigaya district, and want to know film director Isabel Coixet's picks for tapas restaurants in Spain.
What's more, its content model might be copied. To outlast copycats, it may have to build a defensible moat for its model around its analytics technology for hotel operators.