Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2023: GauVendi

GauVendi is a sales and revenue system for hospitality. We break away from static room type inventory management and introduce dynamic and feature-based inventory management. The data structure and product data points are the basis of smart AI and machine learning. They enable novel ways of selling, revenue management, marketing and automation opportunities for any type of accommodation business.

PhocusWire coverage

• An early look at new attribute-based shopping for hotels
• Startup Stage: GauVendi brings dynamic and feature-based inventory management to hotels
• Sojern partners with GauVendi to drive direct accommodation bookings
  

  Founders Carina Stegmayer and Markus Mueller (not pictured Duy Nguyen)

Strategic goals for 2023
A key goal is to apply our booking solution and novel way of marketing room experiences to other small/medium size hotel chains and measure brand value increase through a case study. The channel shift of direct bookings is an important criterion for this exercise besides the direct increase in RevPAR due to the monetization of room features, which we have already proven.

To support our growth, we focus on three main pillars to guide our direction.

• Add more interfaces to property management systems and listings in web stores, supported by marketing partnerships as a solution for attribute-based selling.
• Continue to build authority with unique content around novel sales and labeling tactics with research partners such as the Frauenhofer Institute and other institutions with behavioral science capabilities.
• Continue to expand our marketing alliances that complement our novel booking solution to drive more direct bookings for our customers.

Lessons learned since founding
The fact that we didn't receive any external funding at the beginning was a good thing. It forced us to be extremely focused on the product we wanted to build, to develop a scalable software solution that has the potential to change the entire distribution landscape of our beloved industry.

It’s no secret that you need the right team to be successful. However, you do not know always if you have the right team from the beginning and we learned to make the tough calls early in the game. Especially when it came to finding the right software engineers, there were some missteps in the beginning.

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