Day-use hotel booking website HotelsByDay is expanding its guest offerings through its acquisition of Dayaxe, a marketplace that sells hotel amenities.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal is a combination of cash and equity.
HotelsByDay was founded in 2015 as a platform that allows travelers to reserve unused guest rooms during the day.
With the acquisition, the New York-based company will now offer access to pools, cabanas, spas and fitness rooms on its platform.
The deal also provides new revenue optimization opportunities for hotels.
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In an exclusive interview with PhocusWire, HotelsByDay founder and CEO Yannis Moati says that 60% of hotel spas, pools and gyms are currently underutilized.
Moati believes that Dayaxe can fulfill the growing demand for hotel amenities.
“I was amazed by seeing the traction and the skills that they were able to apply in marketing with less than 60 hotels,” Moati says. “They've done an incredible amount of sales.”
Expanding into hotel amenities allows HotelsByDay to tap into new marketing channels, such as Facebook advertising and social media influencers.
“Influencers are more susceptible in talking about the pool that they booked and the cabanas and the food and beverage that they ordered at the hotel during a full leisurely day than promoting a room for a few hours, which sometimes can come with a connotation that the influencer might not necessarily want to condone,” says Moati.
Finding hotels to partner with the new amenities service is another area of focus for the company.
“It remains to be seen in exactly how well the hotels convert, but I can tell you from our research and from our market study that the conversation is very similar in both HotelsByDay products and Dayaxe products,” says Moati.
But what’s stopping hotels from offering these amenities themselves?
“They are not skilled necessarily to push these services,” says Moati. “They don't want the complications with it and they certainly don't want the spend in marketing that comes with it.”
In the future, Moati says there is also an opportunity for HotelsByDay to partner with third parties, including online travel agencies.
“That is a conversation that remains to be seen,” says Moati. “We have just arrived in this sector of amenities, so the conversations are super fresh and corporate deals and corporate conversations take a year before they form.”
There are also several competitors who already provide on-demand amenities to guests, including Daycation - one of the PhocusWire Hot 25 Startups of 2020.
“Are we afraid of competition? No,” says Moati.
“We know how to compete. We know how to talk to the hoteliers. We already have a large portfolio of connections in the industry. We built the name. We built the reputation.”