On March 7, 2019, Airbnb announced its agreement to acquire HotelTonight*, a hotel-booking service focused on making last-minute trips easy and fun by offering guests seamless, on-demand booking for boutique and independent hotels.
Here we’d like to take a look back at a video from 2014, in which HotelTonight’s founder and CEO Sam Shank sits down with Battery Ventures’ Jeff Lu to discuss the early days at HotelTonight.
Sam discusses how he spotted the enormous platform shift taking place around mobile computing back in 2010, when he founded the company, and how that inflection created the opportunity for HotelTonight to carve out a unique market offering with its last-minute, hotel-booking mobile app. He also shares how an early focus on delivering a superior customer experience—from the design and experience of the product itself to the company’s customer service—led to word of mouth traction that fueled the company’s early growth.
For more on the early days at HotelTonight, watch here:
HotelTonight’s Co-Founder and CEO Sam Shank sits down with Battery’s Jeff Lu to discuss HotelTonight’s recent growth, international expansion and “mobile only” business strategy.
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*Denotes a Battery portfolio company. For a full list of all Battery investments, please click here.
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