Name:
Room 77Quick Pitch: Room 77 is a hotel room database and search engine that helps travelers find great rooms.
Genius Idea: Room Request Guarantee, a coming-soon feature that will let users secure their preferred room when booking at a partner hotel.
Years ago, Brad Gerstner, now the founder of hotel-search startup Room 77, would maintain a running list of his favorite hotel rooms on his BlackBerry. Friends got wind of the list and started asking for copies, and Gerstner started thinking about the larger problem, a problem of information asymmetry: Hotel front desks have all the information on rooms, while the consumer has nothing.
It to ok years — and countless hours with Gerstner and friends walking through hotel hallways and gathering floor information — for the full Room 77 concept to materialize into a functional hotel room database and search engine. Today, travelers can turn to Room 77 to get the run-down on nearly half a million hotel rooms in 18 different cities.
Why might a traveler want access to this data? For starters, any frequent hotel visitor knows that each stay can vary drastically depending on room size, bed quality, balcony or view. Consumers often demand higher floors or rooms with views to circumvent bad experiences; but most often, guests are slotted into rooms as hotel clerks or computer algorithms see fit.
Room 77 is designed to give would-be hotel guests access to a combination of hotel-sourced and people-sourced room information so that they can book better rooms.
The site and companion iPhone app [iTunes link] return “Room Cards” matched t o user preferences...
