Stay22 Raises $750,000 to Streamline Accommodation Booking
Forget that old saying about content—it turns out convenience is king.
Stay22 has announced they have raised a $750,000 seed round to help transform how travelers to events book and find accommodations. The funding round was led by 7 Gates Ventures with participation from Real Ventures and Travelport.
The Montreal-based company acts as a hyper-local accommodation guide, providing users with every available place to stay around an event they may be attending. Say there is a music festival coming up—Stay22 will map out the hotels, hostels and Airbnbs around the festival all on one intuitive map for the user to choose from. There are price points, distances from the event and more, all in one easy-to-read widget.
“We know exactly how frustrating booking a place to stay can be, and we’ve decided to fix it,” reads Stay22’s site. “The lead up to an event should be exciting, not a stressful search for somewhere to stay. That’s why we’re working to make sure event planners and event-goers can focus on what really matters—the event.”
The platform has seen a lot of action so far through 2018. In the first quarter alone, Stay22 booked over $600,000 worth of accommodations, and they now sport over 6.5 million listings from Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and more. Perhaps the most amazing metric is Stay22’s conversion rate of 4.48 per cent, close to double that of standard hotel metasearches, which is 2.4 per cent.
Airbnb is also collaborating with Stay22 to put properties into their own event widgets, but perhaps an even cooler partnership is one with Pearl Jam, the massively successful rock band. Pearl Jam brought on Stay22 to help offer accommodations to those buying tickets to the band’s home and away tour, hitting Chicago, Boston, Seattle and Missoula.
Beyond that, Stay22 has the ability to partner with a lot of different providers. Airbnb is a natural partner, but the platform also works with Evenko in Canada and Weezevent in France. Overall Stay22 covers more than 600 events in 20 countries.
Potential new customers just simply head to the Stay22 site and learn how to embed the widget into their event site. As shown above, the two different categories of users are events and platforms, and the overall goal is to provide a range of options for customers, steer clear of room blocks for massive events, save time and money, and just improve the overall user experience when it comes to looking at places to stay.