Stayful is a website and mobile application that allows consumers to bid for or book rooms at independent and boutique hotels. The rooms, which may have otherwise gone unsold, are sold at a lower price than the published rate for the consumer and a lower cost of distribution for the hotel.
Contents
Stayful is headquartered in New York with a location in San Francisco.
Concept
Stayful looks at hotel rates in comparison to what it determines as fair values based on market factors. These factors include supply and demand, day of the week time of the year and prices offered by competitors. A Stayful user sees a suggested fair bid on the website and may enter that bid (or even a lower bid) to be submitted to the hotel. Co-founder Cheryl Rosner said in The Wall Street Journal that hotels accept around 60% of the bids submitted from Stayful.
Founders
Stayful was co-founded by Cheryl Rosner and Shariq Minhas. Rosner is the former president of Hotels.com and was president of corporate travel at Expedia. She led Hotels.com from 1999 to 2005. The company became a successful IPO in 2000 and launched the hotels.com consumer brand in 2002. She worked with Expedia from 2005 to 2007. Soon thereafter, Rosner became the President and CEO of TicketsNow, the world’s largest independent online marketplace for premium event tickets, and orchestrated its sale to Ticketmaster in 2008.
Minhas has run engineering teams at Hotwire, Expedia, Jigsaw, FanIQ.
Launch and expansion
As of 2015, Stayful has launched in 25 cities throughout the United States and Canada. Plans for international expansion include Europe.