Background
- For vacation rental owners looking to drive sales to holidaymakers, there are currently two main options: build their own website and take bookings directly and/or list their property on a third-party ‘online travel agents’ (OTAs) like Airbnb or Booking.com.
- However, there are a few key challenges with these approaches: 1) for rental owners, creating a website that is optimised to finding the right customer and handling direct bookings is difficult and not cost effective, 2) commissions paid to OTAs are high at c. 15%-25% of the value of a sale and 3) manually co-ordinating short-term bookings across a range of different OTAs and websites is complex and inefficient.
- Lodgify’s vacation rental SaaS platform addresses these challenges by enabling its customers to seamlessly set-up a direct bookings website and manage their inventory across the OTA platforms all in one place, reducing their customers dependencies on a single OTA provider.
- The total addressable market is significant with 15 million vacation rental properties worldwide, of which 80% of these properties are operated by long-tail hosts – a segment of the market which is overlooked by SaaS vendors. Lodgify has identified this opportunity and has built the leading pure play provider for the long-tail market.
Who are the pioneers?
Dennis Klett and Marco de Gregorio co-founded Lodgify in 2012 with a simple mission: to help hosts and small property managers leverage technology effectively in order to grow their businesses and boost their independence. With a combination of his background in finance and experience helping his parents scale their vacation rental business, Dennis, Lodgify’s CEO, has been highly effective in steering the business, guiding the product vision, and attracting talent to the business. Marco, CTO, brings experience as both a developer and a founder, having previously co-founded a start up in the holiday rentals space, and occupied a role as Senior Web Developer at Vueling Airlines.
Why we invested
Consumer adoption of vacation rentals has accelerated over the last 3 years, with the pandemic unlocking the potential for a more nomadic lifestyle and remote working creating opportunities to explore new places. We believe this is a trend that is here to stay.
Lodgify has carved out a leading position for itself in an underserved part of the vacation market. We were very impressed by how automated their offering is and the efficient go-to-market engine they have built.
At Octopus Ventures, we’re committed to empowering individuals and business owners by giving small businesses the tools they need to thrive. With their focus on the long tail of customers and the independence their solution offers to small property managers, Dennis, Marco and the Lodgify team do exactly that.
