STARTUP STAGE: Amenitiz helps independent hotels tackle a digital world

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Amenitiz is an all-in-one solution centralizing all the tools an independent hotelier needs to run his hotel and boost direct bookings. 

We offer an intuitive property management system, a website builder with a fully-integrated booking engine and a channel manager to help them centralize all their bookings in one place. 

Amenitiz is built on the idea that each and every hotelier in the world, no matter where they are located, should be able to manage their online distribution and their property without depending on five different providers, long staff training and high monthly costs.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

A beautiful, functional website and easy-to-use booking engine is the key to getting more direct bookings.

We created Amenitiz because we believe that every hotelier/vacation rental property owner in the world - whether they are in the heart of Paris or in the Uyuni salt flats of Bolivia - should be able to create and manage his/her own website, without hiring an expensive agency. 

We also strongly believe that technology is key to making the job of managing all of the reservations coming from the online channels quicker and easier to accomplish, with a much higher rate of efficiency and a lower chance of error.
 
That’s why we created Amenitiz - an all-in-one solution with all of the tools that vacation rental properties, B&Bs and independent hotels need to get more direct bookings, including: 

• An uncomplicated, highly-intuitive online tool to build better hotel websites, which makes it simple for everyone - no matter their technical knowledge and capabilities - to design and build a beautiful website with all of the online features that hotels and vacation rental properties need to stand-out from the crowd in the highly competitive, online booking marketplace. 
• Unlike other website building tools, Amenitiz offers more than just pre-made templates, which only allow simple design edits; Amenitiz is truly a better website building tool, as hoteliers can create a customized website – with a booking engine that converts more sales - that can compete with - and beat - websites created by the best web design agencies in the industry. 
• A booking engine that is natively integrated into the property’s website and which was specifically designed, by Amenitiz’ hospitality online sales experts, to convert more direct bookings.
• An easy-to-master Property Management System (PMS) to more effectively run the day-to-day operations of a property, fully equipped with sophisticated payment processing tools, an invoicing system, thorough reporting, as well as many other useful features.

• A real-time channel manager that makes it easy to manage room rates across more than 120 online travel agencies and other online booking channels - all from a single dashboard.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strength: Our website-building technology is far more advanced than what currently exists in the hospitality Industry. 

Today, most solutions are either pimped-out WordPress websites or they use very simple templates, with almost no freedom for the user to personalize the site to better suit their brand, property and specific needs. 

This strong creative freedom also allows Amenitiz to service a wide range of properties, from beautiful villas to small hotel chains, which (while they have very different needs) are all successfully using Amenitiz to craft their website.

Also, according to our customers across four continents, the centralization of all of the functionality in a single platform is one of our key strengths, especially at a price most properties can afford.

Finally, my direct experience of being a property owner allowed us to have valuable insights into how properties are using their system and to help them improve their operational processes.

Weaknesses: To date, we have been focused on the development of our solution, our launch to the industry and finalizing our recent round of investor funding; our next project – which we have already started – is to increase our connectivity with other providers, via the development of our API.

Opportunities: While most large properties and chains have already gone digital, many smaller property owners are just realizing the importance of having a user-friendly, up-to-date website, which makes it easy for guests to search for rates/availability and book directly, on any device, without any tech struggles or headaches.

Unfortunately, smaller properties have been largely under-served by the big tech vendors. At Amenitiz, we designed our solution with these properties in mind, so there is a huge opportunity for success.

Threats: At the moment, we don’t see any threats to our business or solution, unless consumers decide to stop booking travel online completely, which, as we all know, will never happen! 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

There are multiple pain points that Amenitiz alleviates for our customers, but our key differentiator is simplicity.

With Amenitiz, hoteliers no longer need to depend on expensive agencies to build their website and the constant – and costly - back and forth every time they need to update their content.

All our tools are natively connected to each other and provide a full range of functionality, eliminating the need for multiple solutions from multiple tech vendors, and the headaches that are so common when there is an issue with the systems’ functionality. No more of the blame game!

We build our tools with small, independent hoteliers and vacation rental owners in mind, making them as easy-to-use, yet powerful, as possible. We don’t want our clients to invest time and money on extensive training whenever a new employee is hired, or new functionality is added. 

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We launched Amenitiz just over a year and a half ago and, in that time, we have already signed more than 600 happy clients all over the world, with only a handful of salespeople and without any marketing outreach. 

Our demo conversion rate is 80% - a very rare statistic in the ever-growing, highly competitive hospitality technology industry - which reinforces the high quality of our product, the passion of our team and the ubiquity of the need for this type of solution.

Soon, our goal is to add other talented people to our amazing team, giving us the opportunity to implement a new and improved marketing strategy.

In the next 18 months, we plan to deploy a mix of outbound and inbound marketing strategies with the intention of introducing the solution to as many independent property owners as possible. 

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Through my family’s personal experience running a hotel, I was able to see, first-hand, how disparate, non-integrated solutions could wreak havoc on reservations and profits – and I wanted to change that. 

From my education and years of experience in the hospitality industry, I developed a large network of hospitality professionals from whom I could get feedback (on our solution) – and the feedback was unanimous: Amenitiz’ solutions eliminate all of the common online booking pain points, decrease operational costs and boost direct bookings.
  
Once we launched, our initial customers’ positive feedback and our high conversion rate reinforced the fact that we were truly filling a need that small hoteliers and vacation rental owners had, and in doing so, improving their businesses and their lives.

How and when will you make money?

The short answer is… we already are! Like most SAAS solution providers, we charge a monthly fee for the use of our product and we expect to reach €100,000 of monthly recurring revenue within the next 12 months, before raising our Series A funding.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

The founding team is comprised of a serial-entrepreneur, a hospitality industry expert and a technology whiz kid:  

Alexandre Guinefolleau, Founder and CEO of Amenitiz, is a serial entrepreneur and an alumnus of the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne with years of hospitality industry experience. Coming from a family of hoteliers, he has a strong knowledge of the struggle you face while running an independent hotel and uses this knowledge to help hoteliers improve their operational processes. 

Emmanuelle Guinefolleau, COO and Co-Founder at Amenitiz, is a serial entrepreneur with a very strong sales background. She has experience leading teams of more than 30 people to take companies from €0 to €250,000 revenue, in less than a year. 
 
Frederic Cadet, CTO and Co-Founder at Amenitiz, is a technology expert with strong business acumen and long-term vision. He built our solution with scalability in mind, to ensure that we can continue to offer our powerful tools to as many hotels as possible, and build new, fully integrated solutions as the need arises. 

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

The biggest challenge we have faced as a young company is establishing trust with potential clients. 

We are asking hoteliers to trust us with their direct sales, building a brand-new website and their booking-engine; basically, everything that makes it possible for them to accept direct bookings.

If anything were to go wrong, they could (potentially) lose thousands of euros, so we entered the industry knowing that we had to keep that in mind when selling.
 
In this situation, most startups would release an MVP to test the solution and the expected results; of course, we did the same but, unlike other technology vendors who rush headfirst to market as soon as possible, we spent a year ensuring that the solution was perfect before going to market. 

Even after signing our first client, we worked with her daily for three months, to make sure that our solution fulfilled all her needs because, in the end, we knew that her success would also be our success. 

A year later and a half, more than 600 properties have trusted us with their website and managing their property’s online bookings, so we know that we’ve now established strong trust within the industry – and we’re excited to expand into more markets, empowering even more hoteliers with the technology necessary to drive more direct bookings.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Success is never the outcome of only one factor. We know that Amenitiz is going to make a huge, long-lasting impact on the industry because we have the best product, designed specifically for independent hoteliers, but also because we launched strategically, at the right time, and priced our product to make it accessible for all properties.  

We are also very proud to have built such a strong team, both in our leadership and our talented employees, all of whom put so much energy and passion into making our company/solution, the best possible. 

We also work with seasoned travel industry investors, including Otium Capital (Owner of Smartbox and Weekendesk), Sebastien Venturini (CEO of Weekendesk), Antoine Giraud (COO of Groupcorner) and Guillaume Rostand, CMO of Liligo. 

We have appointed experienced Board Members, including Arthur Waller (the ex-CEO of Pricematch who also exited to Booking.com) and Jérémie Bordier (CTO of Instant Gaming).

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

The year 2020 will be a year of sustained growth for Amenitiz. 

By the end of the year, we aim to be helping over 2,200 properties all over Europe, quadrupling the number of clients we currently have. 

We’ll also start adding partners into our marketplace ecosystem, with the goal of bringing more services to our client base.

Finally, we plan for an ambitious funding round, allowing us to keep on scaling the team while also bringing industry veterans on board to deploy Amenitiz into most of Western Europe.

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, ect.)

We want Amenitiz to be the go-to platform for anyone opening or managing a property no matter where it is located. 

In addition to providing them with a very simple and incredibly powerful platform to manage their business, we’ll also connect them to an entire ecosystem of partners to help them grow it.

Our goal is to achieve for the hospitality industry what Shopify has achieved for e-commerce.