Investors are still bullish on hotel business-to-business technology. Voyat, a B2B tool for hotel owners that brings actionable customer data through a persistent social log-in, has raised $1.8 million in seed funding.
Metamorphic Ventures, Eniac Ventures, and Box Group, and several angel investors, including Brett Crosby, co-founder of Google Analytics, have seeded the startup.
The deal is not convertible debt, but the company has not disclosed terms.
The move comes after more than a dozen investments and acquisitions in the past year that involve software-as-a-service (SaaS) and white-label technologies aimed at the hotel industry.
Retaining customers via social profiles
Unlike other third-party hotel customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Voyat associates a guest's profile in a database with their social identity online.
As guests sign onto the hotel’s Wi-Fi or website using a social network profile, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ or email address as an authentication method, Voyat records that information -- which it then uses to track the guest's interactions with the brand after the stay.
For instance, if the guest visits the hotel's website months later, the website will recognize the guest and provide a personalized message.
Until now, this has usually been possible only when a customer has joined the hotel chain's loyalty program and has agreed to be indefinitely logged in.
If Voyat's analysis of customer data is that they're traveling for leisure instead of business, the hotel would be prompted to trigger leisure-oriented promotional messages.
This tracking is useful for personalized marketing, or enabling a hotel to lure a customer into repeat business with a tailored offer across marketing channels, namely, at the front desk, via e-mail, or on the hotel's landing page.
CEO Ben Habbel said in an interview:
From a technical standpoint, we monitor by placing a cookie on the device that the consumer logins with to connect to Wi-Fi. We also note the device's ID and the guests' social identity -- with the information a user has made publicly available through their social network, such as their age.
He says this tracking allows for Voyat to identify a hotel's most profitable guests by tagging each guest's record with a loyalty score, and matching that with information about the guest's preferred perks, such as having a daily newspaper delivered to their door.
Ambitious start-up
Founded in 2012 and based in New York City, Voyat says it licenses its technology to hotels, such as Starwood's W Hotels, the Morgans Hotel Group and the Shangri-La in Santa Monica, on a SaaS model.
With the new funding, the eight-employee company plans to expand. It has just opened an office in Barcelona and it says it is also in Las Vegas and Miami.