Air travelers have Kayak to aggregate flight deals, but once you land you need AllTheRooms. Founded by a former Travelocity exec and Morgan Stanley investment banker, the company has raised $1.1 million to help find all the rooms in a particular city.
In short, the system scans all potential room sources. They can bring up hotels and hostels without issues but they can also grab data from Airbnb and other rental services in order to give you a full picture of what’s available in a city. The service works just like any other hotel service except that you get, well, all the rooms. Hotels appear with lofts alongside cottages in the woods.
The system finds the best spots nearest your desired location and takes into consideration rental availability. You simply click through to reserve the room or house.
The company has been growing 20-30% a week for the past few months and they found a few interesting statistics. In San Francisco, 56% of their customers chose Airbnb apartments while in New York 43% chose apartments. Overall, 39% of their customers chose apartments over hotels. Most of their funding came from New York Angels as well as EF Angels and 37 Angels, which is an interesting point. As Airbnb explodes in the Valley, it’s clear that investors on this side of the land mass are looking towards hospitality as the next big thing.
“We’re still the only site besides Airbnb that has all of Airbnb’s inventory, allowing it to be compared directly with hotels,” said co-founder William Beckler. “We have dozens of other home stay sites that aren’t as famous as Airbnb but all worth checking.”
The service has already raised a lot of attention in the budget and professional travel sites like Flyertalk and Tnooz. The pair call their site “the world’s first and only truly complete accommodation metasearch engine,” which, given the alternatives, is true. Just as Kayak can miss a few smaller airlines in their search, most hotel aggregators aim solely for the hotel traveler. As a result, you get a limited view of the potential market.
“Existing hotel-focused metasearch engines, such as Kayak and Trivago, never present travellers with all the rooms available in a given destination, forcing the consumer to visit dozens of sites. We save the customer time and money by combining absolutely every room on the internet into one well designed and incredibly fast search engine,” said Beckler. I, for one, welcome our hotel and apartment-sharing aggregator overlords.