Meet Amenitiz, a Barcelona-based startup that describes its products as the operating system for independent hoteliers, B&Bs and cottages. In more technical terms, Amenitiz has been building a vertical software-as-a-service product that combines everything you need to run a hotel.
The company just raised a $7.5 million (€6.5 million) seed round led by Point Nine. Backed, Otium and several business angels, such as Avi Meier, Matt Robinson and Carlos Gonzales, also participated in today’s round. Jean-Christophe Taunay and Arthur Waller are also going to be independent board members.
In particular, Amenitiz takes care of three important bricks in the hotel industry — it’s a property management system, it acts a channel manager and it let you accept direct bookings more easily.
You may have noticed that the same hotel is listed on many different websites that mostly belong to two companies — Booking Holdings (Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak…) and Expedia Group (Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, Trivago…). As distribution channels are highly fragmented, it has become complicated to manage listings on all those websites.
Hotels usually rely on channel managers to avoid cumbersome micro-management work. A channel manager can manage your listings across dozens of booking sites at once. Bookings are synchronized, which means that your hotel will appear as full on Hotels.com when you have sold the last room on Booking.com.
And a channel manager becomes even more useful when it integrates directly with your property management system (PMS). That tool lets you manage your hotel. For instance, you can allocate rooms, add an extra night and get an overview of the next couple of weeks.
Instead of relying on legacy technology, Amenitiz wants to create a proper software-as-a-service alternative that works well out of the box. As an added benefit, you can build cool stuff on top of this foundation.
For instance, the startup also helps you create a website your for your hotel or B&B. On this site, you can let users book rooms directly using the startup’s booking module. And even if people want to book a room with a phone call or a WhatsApp message, you can send a payment link and track the booking in Amenitiz.
So far, Amenitiz has attracted 3,000 properties. With today’s funding round, Amenitiz plans to add more features, such as revenue management. It’ll triple the size of its teal with a focus on the French, Italian and Spanish markets.