About

The majority of hotels and vacation rentals (VR) are currently stuck at the fixed-rates pricing model; they hire one or more employees to handle the revenue management. The revenue manager manually updates the prices based on market dynamics, such as demand and competitors’ rates. Due to the high number of variables that are correlated with the market rates, this approach leaves enough room for pricing mistakes and missed opportunities. Especially small- and medium-sized hoteliers, who lack the essential financial resources, experience such issues as they try to implement a pricing room policy on their own, which constitutes a challenging task that requires a lot of time and resources for the hotel. Our company offers an automated pricing process and suggests the optimal price for a room or a property, saving time and resources for hotel and VR managers.

Solution & Product

RevApp is offering a machine learning room pricing tool, currently focusing on small and mid-sized hoteliers and vacation rentals’ managers that will allow them to capture any missed profits by maximizing their revenues and reducing their fixed costs and time allocated to this task. Our model, which takes into account demand, occupancy level, lead time, property, room and market characteristics, competition and seasonality, implements machine learning techniques in order to perform dynamic pricing and suggest an optimal renting price, which is automatically filled in the Property Management System. This way, our tool saves substantial time and helps the customer to make more accurate real-time pricing decisions in order to convert the page visitor into a guest.

Innovation & Scalability

2020 has been a challenging year for hospitality with the pandemic reducing revenues by 95% in USA and Europe. Hence, the vast majority of hotels and vacation rental (VR) managers have turned to smart hospitality approaches such as channel management software and automatic communication tools. Specifically, there is a rapid adoption of such approaches with forecasts that in 2026, they will constitute a €37.6bn industry (from €6.6bn in 2018). RevApp is part of this sector and solves a highly important problem of hotels and VR managers (i.e., the automatic pricing of their rooms). During the CapsuleT accelerator program, we found out that many Greek hotels are interested in such a pricing tool, with only a few of them using one already. Hence we believe that our growth potential is very significant both in the Greek and the global markets. Of course there are numerous challenges to this. First, we need to acquire significant capital that will allow us to adopt an aggressive marketing approach with capital injections during the first two years too. Second, talent acquisition is another barrier. Our tool is highly innovative and its implementation required significant knowledge and expertise of modern technologies. Our team has complementary skills and has been able to develop our tool within house and with the collaboration of four freelancers. Nonetheless, the acquisition of highly talented individuals that will help us expand in many markets constitutes a challenging task.

Traction & achievements

We started working on this idea about a year ago. We initially gathered data from the properties of Alexandros and his company ToStay in order to develop an initial algorithm for our product. In May we secured 15,000 as pre-seed funding from EIT Digital Venture (in exchange for 5% in equity) and became part of its accelerator program. Next, we joined Egg's incubator program and in July we developed a fully functional Minimum Viable Product for the area of Attiki. In August we created the company, based in Athens and we also shared this product with several potential customers, acquired their feedback and secured six letters of intent. In September we became part of CapsuleT accelerator program. During the past two months, we tested our product in a hotel in Athens with very promising results (i.e., the revenues were increased by around 45%) and we discuss to test it in four other hotels too. We also became part of the programs Greek Startup Universe and chosen (among more than 200 other companies) as one of the 20 startups for the final round of the Aceler@tech Program in Portugal. In May we launched our product and we have two paying customers and 13 users to whom we offer our product as a free trial for one month. We have also established collaborations with one Property Management System company, two tour operators and several other startups.

Team & Why Us

Alexandros Toulias, our CEO, is an expert in real estate and hospitality finance, having worked for GE Capital and founded two companies in the past, ToStay and Arura. He holds a BA and an MSc in Civil Engineering from NTUA and an MSc in Real Estate Development from Columbia University. Emmanouil Avgerinos, our COO, has extensive experience in data analysis and optimization. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Decision Sciences in the area of Operations and Technology at IE Business School. He holds a BA and an MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from NTUA, an MSc in Operations Research from Columbia University and a PhD in Operations Management from University College London. Katerina Skroumpelou, our CTO, is an expert in software engineering with Web Technologies and Cloud Services. She holds a BA and an MSc in Architectural Engineering from NTUA and an MRes on Spatial Data Analysis from University College London. There are currently four main competitors. Our main competitive advantage include: 1. Incorporating user reinforcement learning in our model, something which is not met in any of our competitors. 2. Focusing initially more on small and mid-sized hotels and vacation rental companies, which makes our approach more targeted on their needs. 3. Using a highly sophisticated model, making our approach more efficient. 4. Starting by focusing on Greece and then expanding in international cities, which makes our approach more local-based and effective.

Funding Needs

We have already secured pre-seed funding and we are in the process of securing additional pre-seed funding from a number of angel investors that will allow us to expand our team and services. We would be more than happy to discuss it further over a meeting.