Remember Dara Khosrowshahi? The former Expedia CEO that has been poached by Uber to serve as its next CEO. The former CEO has facilitated a $26 million series B round for the hotel Startup, Alice.
According to TechCrunch, the former Expedia CEO has led a $26 million investment round in the New York-based startup Alice. This latest funding round brings the startup’s total venture capital funding to $39 million. It also makes Expedia the startup’s majority shareholder or investor. Alice plans to use the fresh capital to expand its development and grow customer team.
About Alice, the hotel startup
Founded in 2013 and based in New York, Alice helps hotels manage operations and communication with guests. The company’s core product is a workflow management platform that is used by hotel’s staff to dispatch, track and execute all hotel requests and guest communications. The platform also used as an organizational tool, allowing hotel’s staff to schedule and record data on a single platform. Additionally, the platform also connects multiple hotel departments and systems, allowing them to communicate directly while also offering the hotel’s management the ability to monitor the life cycle of the given task.
In addition, Alice also offers a guest service module that allows hotel’s guests to communicate with hotel’s staff using the Alice mobile app on their smartphone.
The app also allows hotel’s guests to requests services like room service, dinner reservations, taxi accommodations, item requests, maintenance service and even spa reservations.
Alice started its life as a guest-facing concierge messaging app. Since then, it has evolved into hospitality technology that aims to provide the first unified platform for a hotel to run its back-end operations and customer service communications.
The startup gets its name from the housekeeper on the 1970s TV show “Brady Bunch.”
Alice has three core products: a request management tool called Alice Staff, a task tracking tool for concierge teams Alice Concierge, and a communication tool for guest and hotel staff Alice Guest. The company’s customers include the Nylo Hotels, Sixty Hotels, and Triumph Hotels.
This is not the first time Alice has received significant funding from the travel website Expedia. In January 2016, the startup received $9.5 million in venture capital from its Series A funding round led by Expedia.
About the backer, Expedia
Founded in 1996 and based in Bellevue, Washington, Expedia is a travel-focused website that provides hotel reservations, corporate travel, airline tickets, vacation packages, cruises, and other services. The company also owns and operates several international global online travel brands. It currently operates about 200 travel booking websites in 75 countries and has listings for around 500 airlines and 350,000 hotels.
According to CrunchBase, the travel significant has also made several big acquisitions in the past years.
These include Travelscape (2000), Venere.com (2008), and trivago GmBH (2013). In 2015, Expedia made its biggest acquisitions, the travel agency Orbitz ($1.6 billion) and the holiday rental service HomeAway ($3.6 billion). In addition to acquisitions, the company has also invested in online portal Traveloka and on-demand car service startup Wingz.
Expedia’s interest on Alice’s technology
Some analyst believes that Expedia has plans to get deeper into offering more hotel tech services. Earlier this month, the travel website has introduced a series of new tools for hoteliers that help with messaging and revenue management.
Expedia offers a first meeting-events booking tool that helps hotels automate request for proposals. However, this tool still needs some enhancement. Alice is expected to bring more business opportunities to the travel website.
