Hospitality Software Innovator GuestDriven Inc. Closes $3 million Series A Round Led By Plaza Ventures and Leading Investors from the Travel Industry
Montreal, Canada (PRWEB) February 18, 2014 -- GuestDriven, a rapidly growing hospitality software solution provider, has secured an investment round of over $3 million led by Plaza Ventures (investors in Locationary, Keek), Real Ventures (investors in Frank and Oak, Beyond The Rack), Structure Capital (investors in Uber, Salesforce) and joined by notable technology and hospitality angels including Tony Cohen (CEO of Global Edge Investments and EVP of Business Development for Crescent Hotels & Resorts), Bob MacDonald (President and CEO of Maritz Loyalty) join existing travel technology investors Joe Poulin (Founder and CEO of Luxury Retreats), Peter Kern (Board of Director Member at Expedia) and John Granger (COO at the Drake Hotels).
The company plans to use the funds to further grow the reach and efficacy of the GuestDriven Mobile Guest Engagement platform to provide the world’s leading hotels and resorts of any size with a data-driven platform to deliver a personalized experience for guests from booking to check out and help to drive revenue at the hotel level. The service, already active in 115 properties around the world, delivers actionable insights to hotel management about a guest’s history, spending power, interests and social media influence. Hoteliers can provide useful and relevant local tips, recommendations and on premise perks to loyal guests right to their smartphone or tablet. The solution is shown to drive up on-premise orders and revenue per stay, increasing sales.
Joining the board of directors are Jesse Kaplan (Plaza Ventures), Tom Botts (Denihan Hospitality), Joe Poulin (Luxury Retreats), John Stokes (Real Ventures) and Tony Cohen (GEI and Crescent Hotels & Resorts).
“GuestDriven demonstrates the next generation platform of choice for the hospitality space in an evolving landscape ripe for adoption of social and mobile technology change.” said Jesse Kaplan, Partner at Plaza Ventures.
“After working with the GuestDriven solution, I was impressed with the level of personalization data that the platform provided us – and the immensely positive feedback on the mobile experience from our guests” said Tom Botts , EVP at Denihan Hospitality.”
GuestDriven’s platform captures social media, loyalty, hotel stay and mobile location and usage data, and leverages contextual information to enable personalized experiences, and in the aggregate, a unique ‘big data’ view of guest behaviour trends and industry performance.
“GuestDriven is part of a new generation of Canadian startups focused on successful data-driven products,” said John Stokes, General Partner at Real Ventures. “Their platform is an entirely new way for hotels to do business with their guests and for guests to experience hotel stays, using streams of data untapped in an integrated fashion before now.”
We’re very excited to have received this support from experienced technology investors and leading travel industry executives,” said Anthony Zebrowski-Rubin, CEO at GuestDriven. “With this funding we’re able to grow the platform further, providing an even greater experience to our current customers and guests and expanding into the leading hospitality brands in international markets.”
About GuestDriven
GuestDriven is a mobile guest engagement platform for the hospitality industry that enables guests to engage directly with hotels via their mobile devices. The software-as-a-service platform provides hoteliers with valuable information about their guests’ preferences and behaviors, which they can leverage to offer personalized perks, promotions and rewards to elevate the guest experience and increase revenues. GuestDriven helps hospitality brands build customer advocacy, providing deep, actionable insights into guest preferences and behaviors in real-time, with a suite of integrated tools for targeting, campaigning, and interacting with the guest at each and every stage of travel. To date, GuestDriven has implementations in over 35 cities. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in Montreal, Canada.
About Plaza Ventures
Plaza Ventures invests in early stage technology companies with a unique model that pools high net worth capital with corporate and institutional capital. The investment focus is to bridge the gap between Seed and Series A funding for promising, high-growth Canadian companies in enterprise software, mobile internet and digital media. The Plaza team and its investment partners actively assist in building enterprise value and delivering positive liquidity outcomes.
Visit their website at http://www.plazaventures.ca
Ed Zitron, EZPR, +1 (347) 844-2149, [email protected]
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