Roomify Offers Personalized Room Booking Platforms

Ronald Ashri, Co-Founder and CEO of Roomify, helps travellers and accommodation hosts connect directly by encouraging every host to manage their activities and accommodations through their own site.

Ronald is part of our Travel Massive Sicily chapter and is here today to share with Travel Massive readers some of his helpful hints to starting up a business in the tourism industry.

Who is your startup for?

Roomify is for hosts – whether they are accommodation owners, guides, tour managers, etc. We empower hosts to connect directly with guests through beautiful websites with powerful booking engines that are completely customizable and can connect with the rest of the web to sync prices and bookings.

What is your startup about?

The main inspiration is building open technologies that allow people to connect and share resources, building the engines that drive the sharing economy. Within the travel space in particular, we realised that while there is a host of different solutions for bookings engines out there, the choice hosts have is always constrained by the fact that they cannot innovate on their own. They must always depend on a technology vendor and a few set pieces of functionality.

Our solutions are completely open (open source code) – hosts can bring them in-house and innovate without lock-in and we bring to everyone advanced features like conversations that allow you to create dynamic booking offers on your site so hosts can compete with the big aggregator sites and OTAs.

How did you build your startup?

We are a group of friends that dug deep for a year, lived and worked lean and just focused on learning about what the market needs by talking to hosts (some of us are hosts ourselves). We bootstrapped Roomify, did some consulting work on the side and now we have a product we are ready to launch in the world.

What makes your startup different from other similar startups out there?

We bring open enterprise-level technologies to the travel world. Open source technologies (such as the Drupal CMS which we use) have disrupted a whole host of different markets because they level the playing field and allow everyone to innovate by lowering the cost to market for new ideas and solutions. Roomify has open in its DNA. You are never locked-in with our solutions and we constantly bring new features to our platform that you can take advantage of.

How did you get your startup off the ground and gaining traction?

The open source community is our strength, as developers come to us looking for solutions for their clients. Our software has been downloaded over 70 thousand times and is running thousands of websites already.

How is your startup changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

We believe that by levelling the playing field and allowing everyone to innovate we will create more opportunities for hosts to deliver better experiences to guests.

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

Everything they say about startups being a crazy emotional ride is true. Do it anyway.

As a startup, what benefits have you seen from being a part of Travel Massive meetups?

Through meetings we’ve connected to great people and shared knowledge. Fostering those connections is what I currently see as the biggest win.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Ronald and Roomify on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter.