DreamCheaper Aims to Help You Save Money on Hotel Bookings

Judith Marx, Social Media Manager at DreamCheaper, helps travelers save money on their existing hotel bookings using a few simple algorithms.

DreamCheaper compares booking platforms, special deal services, and hidden wholesale rates. Every single day their algorithm checks again and in case a lower rate appears on the market, they save their customer’s money by rebooking their existing booking.

Neat? We thought so! So we’ve taken the opportunity to interview Judith and ask her a few questions about how DreamCheaper became a reality.

Who is your startup for?

Every traveler who wants to save money on their existing hotel bookings, whether they’re traveling for business or leisure. It doesn’t matter where they booked their hotel, or where they’re traveling to.

What inspired your team to create DreamCheaper? 

There are hundreds of services helping travelers to decide which hotel to book. There are hundreds helping them to compare prices and to book their stay. There are hundreds allowing them to rate the hotel after their stay. However, there was no one helping travelers to monitor the fluctuating prices between booking and check-in. It was a gap in the market.

How did your team build DreamCheaper?

As the travel market is very complex we intentionally built DreamCheaper very carefully. We have spent a whole year on developing and fine-tuning our price-comparison algorithm. The first year was bootstrapped before we received 7-digit seed investment from Holtzbrinck Ventures, Rocket’s Global Founders Fund and a number of experienced online travel executives.

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

TechCrunch described us as “the hotel industry’s most hated startup” as we reduce the average room rates for hotels as we find and secure those lower rates for our customers. However, this is only part of the story and smart hotels, as well as smart OTAs, can benefit from our existence. We are currently the only company with this kind of service, independent from OTAs, compatible with all kinds of bookings (no matter where and how the traveler booked), plus we make more money the more our customers save – as we are paid by a 20%-success-fee on the amount saved.

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

Start solid. Don’t launch a nice idea with a big boom only to figure out that it does not work in reality. Do dry-runs, intensely. Make sure the idea works and then prepare a careful launch with a simplified but stable IT. Invest in IT-upscaling afterward to make yourself scalable. Don’t waste money on automizing process steps which only costs money when you can outsource to low-cost countries, it will pay off to keep it running like this quite some time.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. You can connect with Judith and DreamCheaper on Travel Massive, Facebook, and Twitter.