Building an operating system for independent hoteliers across Europe, Amenitiz has today announced a massive funding boost of over €27 million – picking up Spain’s largest-ever SaaS Series A round. The funding, just a few months after a €6.5 million raise, was led by global VC investor Eight Roads, backer of Alibaba, Wallapop and Red Points, alongside Chalfen Ventures and existing investors: Point9, Otium and Backed.
Based in Barcelona – a renowned tourist hotspot – Amenitiz is revolutionising processes for independent hotels and B&Bs with its all-in-one Property Management System (PMS). It’s reported by the company that in Europe, where there are over 700,000 hotels, bed & breakfast and vacation rentals, over 80% of them are independent properties with 50 rooms or less. This is a massive market that, until now, has been without such a tailored system.
Even for small properties, managing operations has become increasingly complex over the years as the travel industry has digitised. Now, a large variety of software products have been introduced to the sector, and they are increasingly needed to ensure operations run efficiently. These small business owners are increasingly overwhelmed and frustrated with confusing and overly-complex tech.
Independent hoteliers are typically using a spaghetti of poorly maintained legacy software, mostly on-premise. As a result, many hoteliers are spending two to five hours a day on administrative tasks – taking them away from doing what they love most: welcoming guests.
Launched in 2018, Amenitiz is on a mission to tackle this head-on.
Founders, Alexandre and Emmannuelle Guinefolleau and Frederic Cadet, wanted to create an all-in-one solution to centralise all the tools an independent hotelier could need in one place, a ‘Shopify for hotels’, while helping them boost direct bookings and reducing their dependence on online travel agents. With this simple pitch, and despite launching just before the Covid-19 pandemic, the company has scaled quickly to support over 4k properties in 37 countries, with stellar reviews of 4.8/5.
Alexandre Guinefolleau, CEO of Amenitiz, said: “As hoteliers awaken in a post-covid world, they find themselves even more reliant on their digital presence and online distribution to rebuild and grow their business. Their current tech stack -if any- is incapable of dealing with today’s challenges and guest expectations. This is why we created Amenitiz, to empower independent hoteliers to master every aspect of running their properties and allow them to build a thriving business. And we’re just getting started!”
Amenitiz has re-built the entire stack into a fully integrated and easy-to-use operating system for hoteliers. Starting with their online presence, providing them with a website and a channel manager, but also extending into their operations with a very easy-to-use PMS (Property Management System) that hoteliers use daily to automate their tasks like guest management, communications and invoicing. Last year, Amenitiz also launched a payment module, AmenitizPay, which makes the time-consuming task of payment collection and reconciliation much faster. It also offers a marketplace – a central location for hotels to discover and implement a variety of additional tools provided by third-party vendors.
Headquartered in the Catalan capital, Amenitiz plan to use this funding to expand into new European markets, further scale its 150 people team in Barcelona with the recruitment of 200 new so-called Amenitizers in 2022, and, launch additional products to its platform to keep on making the life of hoteliers easier, such as RMS and Distribution.
Lucile Cornet, Partner at Eight Roads and new Amenitiz board member, commented: “Amenitiz has shown impressive momentum despite the pandemic. This shows how a 10x better product, which is intuitive and easy to use, can quickly achieve product-market fit in a sector that has seen very little innovation in the past few decades. We’re excited to work together with Alex, Emma and Fred. The hospitality tech sector is one we know well, through our investments in OTA Insight, Toast POS, AvantStay, Canary Technology and ConnexPay”.
