5 Years of HotelTonight!

Five years ago, Jared Simon, Chris Bailey and I came together with a simple idea:

If we could build a streamlined mobile app that would make it easy to book a hotel for the same night – with exclusive rates on rooms that would otherwise go empty – then maybe, just maybe, we could open up a new market for hotel booking.

Wow, were we right! There was tremendous latent demand for a better way to book a room at the last minute. This included people who would have booked a hotel over the phone or by walking up to a hotel's front desk, as well as the “spontaneous bookers” who weren’t necessarily in the market for a hotel, but were enticed by the convenience of HotelTonight to book a room vs. going home or staying with a friend.

Starting wasn’t easy – in our first month, we sold only 55 hotel rooms, and most of those were booked by us! But since then we’ve filled millions of rooms, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental revenue to our hotel partners and fulfilling our mission to make the world a more spontaneous place.

We’ve seen people use HotelTonight in ways we never expected: A couple used HT for their entire honeymoon, booking every night, one at a time, from SF to LA. Entire offices use us as their official travel policy. Consultants book after they land to avoid dealing with cancellations due to their ever-changing schedules. People wait to book weekend getaways until they know the weather will be great, or use us to spontaneously turn date night into an overnight.

People often ask me about the best part of starting HotelTonight. The answer is not the one I would have expected to say 5 years ago (delighting customers; changing the way people travel). Instead, it’s been the opportunity to build an amazing team, give them the environment to do their best work, and see them accomplish challenging goals and grow personally and professionally.

In addition to thanking the team, I want to thank my co-founders, all of our hotel partners, our investors, my family and friends and, of course, all of HT's amazing customers. I promise we will continue working tirelessly every day to bring you amazing hotels at great rates and to enable you to have amazing experiences that might not otherwise have been possible.

I enter our sixth year full of energy and enthusiasm for the future of HotelTonight. I can’t wait to show you some of the things we’ll bring you this year!