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Two-sided marketplaces are a precise art. There’s a lot you have to get right simultaneously, at exactly the correct pace for your resources.

Today’s startup, Hotaly, thinks it’s on the right track with a focus on fixing specific pain points in the events-booking market.

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Hotaly wants to make event-booking easier for customers and venues alike

The hospitality sector has been online for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that you’d be forgiven for thinking there are no more problems a tech startup could solve for it. 

But Hotaly believes it’s hit upon a two-sided marketplace concept that will resolve some real pain points in the industry.

Hotels, bars, restaurants, and attractions have plenty of listing platforms that will help get them leads for event bookings, but there’s a problem of quantity over quality.

“A lot of listing platforms out there don't actually understand the leads that are going to venues, or they don't understand the venues themselves,”  says Kris Mochrie, founder and CEO at Hotaly, who previously worked on this side of the market.

“So as a venue, these companies can send leads in, and they are the wrong capacity, they don't fit the brief properly, and they have to waste time responding to these leads and not get a conversion.”

Hotaly is designed to address this problem while also helping venues expand their market. This means a venue that already does well with corporate events mid-week, for example, can more easily attract family leisure bookings at weekends.

To attract leads of different types, the startup has built a listings platform with a number of different front-end brandings, to attract different markets, such as corporate away days and family adventures. A wedding-focused site will be next to launch.

And for people looking to book a venue, Hotaly makes their lives easier with features like live availability of meeting and function rooms, so they know whether to bother even considering a listing or not, and budgeting and planning tools to help them whittle down contenders to find their ideal booking without having to create their own custom spreadsheet for the task.

Mochrie summarises Hotaly’s offering as ‘the Airbnb of events’ to connect bookers to venues, and venues to bookers.

The story so far

Mochrie spent several years of his career in sales for brands like Danone and Red Bull, before moving into the hospitality space.

While exploring a tech startup idea, he ended up taking a role as the managing director of a hospitality group. Despite finding success there over a few years, he still had the startup bug.

So he began taking consultancy contracts, which gave him the funds to start what became Hotaly, a name that combines the words ‘total hospitality’. 

But tragedy struck the nascent startup. Mochrie built an MVP with a co-founder, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, just as they were due to launch it.

“It was devastating for us as a company. He became a huge friend through the process of building this together. And we had to decide, then, do we continue going, or do we stop? Because all of a sudden you become a solo founder unexpectedly.

“That has been probably the biggest challenge. It meant that we had to pivot a little bit… but we decided to continue, and we launched it three months later at the end of January.”

Mochrie has since expanded the team, with an emphasis on hiring people with a hospitality background. 

“Some of the feedback we've had about other tech solutions is that they don't get hospitality. They just don't understand it. They're just tech people. We made a really conscious decision to make sure that everyone we employ, everyone that's part of the team, has a brilliant understanding of hospitality.”

Mochrie says the startup now has 370 venues signed up across its first three cities; London, Manchester, and Liverpool. Scotland and Birmingham are the next target markets for expansion.

Next steps

With annual recurring revenue going in the “right direction”, Mochrie says Hotaly is working on an AI-based feature to help people seeking a venue find the perfect spot by specifying in natural language things like lighting, colours, and other aspects it might be difficult to build into a standard search interface without cluttering it.

For venues themselves, a CRM feature is on the roadmap, allowing them to serve customers from other sources via the Hotaly platform.