direct-bookings
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Marc Heyneker and the hotel that remembers you
A school friendship became Revinate. Marc Heyneker spent years turning hotel feedback into a business built around guests, then handed the CEO job to an adviser who had been there before the beginning.
Wander discovered it didn’t need to own the view
Wander began by buying beautiful vacation homes. Its more interesting discovery was how much of the holiday it could control without holding the deed.
TravelClick and the $1.52 billion price of knowing who books next
A hotel room has an expiration date: tonight. TravelClick built a business around helping hotels see demand sooner, sell rooms more intelligently, and persuade guests to book directly.
TravelNet Solutions and the expensive art of keeping things together
Now called Track, TravelNet Solutions sells vacation rental operators a connected way to run their businesses. Its most revealing lesson begins with 20 Palm Springs homes and a cancellation policy.
Hostaway made a business out of your vacation’s busywork
Behind the holiday photos sit calendars, cleaners and a small mountain of messages. Hostaway turned that administrative mess into a software business, survived a travel shutdown and is now betting on AI to handle more of the shift.
Access Hospitality wants to give hotels their time back
A hotel can sell a room in seconds and spend hours untangling the booking. Access Hospitality is connecting the systems behind the stay, with Guestline at the centre of a much bigger software bet.
Fornova knows what your hotel room is really selling for
A hotel can set its room rate and still lose control of the price guests see. Fornova follows that price across the web, then helps commercial teams decide what to fix first.
Tambourine
The Fort Lauderdale firm has spent three decades trying to answer one question for hoteliers: how do you get a guest to book with you instead of with Expedia?
Fikäfi
Fikäfi is a Singapore-registered payments company built for hotels. It sits between a hotel's booking system and its bank, sending time-bound payment links over email, SMS or WhatsApp, capturing cards before arrival, automating reminders, settling funds by SWIFT, and pushing wallet credit back to guests so they rebook direct instead of through an OTA. Card processing starts at 1.95% with no setup fee or monthly minimum. Co-founded by hospitality-technology veteran Andre Privateer alongside Imran Saeed, the company argues that the industry's real leak is not the guest who cancels but the booking that quietly dies at the payment step - what it calls the "shadow guest." In March 2026 the PMS vendor Elektraweb embedded Fikäfi's payment orchestration layer across a platform serving thousands of hotels.
Softinn Solutions
Softinn Solutions is a Malaysian hotel technology company that builds cloud-based hotel management software for boutique hotels, resorts, villas and hotel chains across the Asia Pacific. Its all-in-one platform pairs a Property Management System with a Channel Manager connected to 40+ OTAs, a commission-free booking engine, a website CMS and self-service check-in kiosks - designed around the mission to 'make hotelier work easier.' Founded in Melaka in 2012 by JeeShen Lee and Caren, Softinn serves 1,000+ hotel owners in markets including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Singapore.
Hovr
Hovr is a Philadelphia-based marketing technology company that layers interactive, vertical-video experiences on top of existing hotel and resort websites. Its patented, no-code software lets marketers drag and drop video content - pulled from YouTube, Vimeo, Matterport, TikTok, and Instagram or uploaded directly - over static web pages using tools like Highlights, Anchors, Pins, and Pathways. The goal is to turn passive browsing into 'choose-your-own-path' storytelling that lifts guest confidence, engagement, and direct bookings, with a real-time analytics dashboard that ties video interactions to revenue. Hovr grew out of Hio, founder Jason Craparo's earlier networking and events venture.
Cloudbeds
Cloudbeds is a San Diego-based hospitality management platform that gives independent hotels, hostels, vacation rentals, and lodging groups a single cloud system to run reservations, distribution, payments, revenue management, and guest communication. Founded in 2012 by Adam Harris and Richard Castle, the fully remote company replaces the tangle of disconnected legacy tools that property owners juggle, serving tens of thousands of properties across roughly 150 countries and, more recently, layering in AI through its Cloudbeds Intelligence and Signals products.
Revinate
Revinate is a hospitality software company that helps hotels turn guest data into direct revenue. Its platform unifies fragmented hotel data into rich guest profiles, then powers CRM, email marketing, guest messaging, voice reservations and reputation tools used by more than 12,500 hotels worldwide.