Travel technology startup Lola has acquired Room 77, the hotel metasearch platform. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
In a post on Medium, Lola founder and chief executive Paul English says:
"We intend to maintain Room 77 as a best-in-class hotel search tool for do-it-yourself travelers.... Besides the technology, I anticipate the platform will also provide strategic insights for helping Lola deliver the best hotel deals through the best channel for our customers."
Room 77 has had quite the rollercoaster ride over the past five years.
Its original premise was a direct-to-consumer play, with the signature trick of letting hotels see floorplans of hotels and, in some cases, see photos of individual rooms.
The ultimate goal was to enable travelers to book individual hotel rooms. But the concept was ahead of its time, as hotels didn't cooperate, by and large. (Years later Hilton vindicated the concept by enabling the booking of individual rooms via its mobile app.)
In 2013, Room 77 -- fresh from a $30 million funding from Expedia and other investors -- hired Drew Patterson as CEO.
In 2014, Room 77 licensed its booking software and gave some of its employees to Google. (Here's what Google got, though the deal later fizzled.)
Patterson threw his emphasis behind a startup-within-a-startup called Checkmate, which specialized in developing messaging technology for hotels.
Earlier this year, after experimenting with B2C and B2B plays, Checkmate was acquired by TrustYou, the guest feedback platform -- which has since been bundling the real-time messaging service into its solution suite.
After the deal, Room 77 continued to invest in its technology and sought patents for it. Its sales team told us this summer that it was hoping hotels would see the light now that Hyatt had proved the underlying model.
The company is notable for developing patented technology related to hotel metasearch. Its metasearch infrastructure supports hotel matching, a sophisticated use of cached data to speed up the delivery of results and to work around the sometimes slow connections to hotel IT databases, scoring and ranking of properties, the ability to generate a computer-rendered view from a window of an hotel room (if the visual content is available), and the structuring of databases for hotel attributes like any given room's distance from elevator.