About

Travelmyth is the hotel recommendation engine for sophisticated travellers seeking unique holiday experiences. With 60 unique categories, you can choose and combine any category to find your perfect accommodation.

We answer advanced hotel search queries based on your interests and recommend the best hotels. Then we compare prices from the biggest booking sites to find the best deal for each hotel. It's up to you then to book on our booking partners or book on Travelmyth. We currently have 4,919,322 hotels in 60 categories.

Why another hotel search engine? Hotel searches in specific categories are poorly answered or not answered at all by our competitors.

Try to search for beachfront hotels or for skyscraper hotels or for hotels with infinity pools.

In unique categories you’ll end up finding blog posts with the 10 best hotels when in reality there could be 1000s of them.

In popular categories like dog-friendly hotels or hotels with swimming pools you’ll find a list with many hotels, but the first results will not be the dog-friendliest hotels or the hotels with the best swimming pools.

The search results look broken in most categories on our competitors’ sites.

Solution & Product

By providing the best answers to advanced hotel searches, our users can discover hotels that they’ll really like but would never have discovered by using the old methods.

We classify hotels in specific categories and then we rank them to bring the best hotels in each category first.

How do we classify hotels? We use different method(s) per category, based on:

• Image recognition: We use a hybrid approach of AI and human analysts
• Information we collect from hoteliers
• Semantic analysis of data that our bots collect while crawling the web
• Geospatial data and satellite imagery analysis
• Data from our partners
• Suggestions from our editors

How do we rank hotels? We have developed sophisticated algorithms tailored to each category.

For example, in the dog-friendly category, we’re in a unique position to rate the dog-friendliness of hotels and bring the dog-friendliest hotels first, because we’ve collected information directly from the hoteliers. Such information is not available anywhere else.

Innovation & Scalability

We have built proprietary technology (sophisticated algorithms and machine learning models) and we collect information not available anywhere else online, allowing us to respond to long tail search queries even in the most unique categories.

In addition, we have developed several proprietary tools to support our operations:

• Hotel matching from different providers (our partners), incl. human operators’ interface
• Official hotel website finder and crawler
• Automated update mechanism of our hotels database from our partners
• Hotelier support platform incl. photo uploading, processing and tagging, and email client
• Quick image category classification tool for editors
• Enhanced PPC ads generator
• A network of travel websites with its own publishing platform
• Decide, generate and send awards to hotels tool
• Destination matching and reverse geocoding
• OTA operations management interface

Our innovation: we have built the technologies to be able to answer hotel search queries more efficiently than any other hotel search engine in the world. This is why our visitors and bookings are from all parts of the world (Income by country of origin 2019: UK 26% - USA 14% - Greece 12% - RoW 48%).

Traction & achievements

May 2014: Strategic Partnership Agreement with Booking.com - Granted access to APIs

November 2014: Launch

October 2016: 1M hotels around the world

2017: Organic traffic started to pick up

June 2017: Started operating as an Online Travel Agent in addition to the meta-search

June 2018: Moved from working only with freelancers to hiring full-time employees

2018: 250% increase in users

July 2019: 2M hotels

2019: 5.000 organic bookings

April 2020: 3000 hotels showcase a travelmyth award on their site

June 2020: 3M hotels

August 2020: Direct contracts with 3500 hotels

July 2022: 4.7M hotels

September 2022: Travelmyth available as an OTA on Google Hotels (maps, search)

January 2023: Travelmyth available in Finland (www.travelmyth.fi)

Team & Why Us

Founders: John Nousis and Stefanos Vasdekis: internet entrepreneurs since 1998, when they co-founded their first business, a free web hosting company that was paying back its members. Since then, they have co-founded several other internet businesses, including an e-commerce SaaS platform for small businesses, an online software store, a webmasters’ portal, a web development/marketing agency and a social network for students.

They’re both experienced in several aspects of building and growing internet companies and they’re the core developers. Studies: Physics and Civil Engineering.

Funding Needs

Our plan is to focus on very specific categories, make them perfect and dominate them. Then, focus on broader categories where we could have a strong advantage.

It takes several years to unfold our strategy, because:

• We rely on organic search traffic, which takes time to build in a sustainable way
• We had to build the infrastructure to operate as a travel agent (get direct booking and sign direct contracts with hotels) as it was a necessity to improve our revenue per visitor
• At the same time we had to launch in other languages (currently Travelmyth is available in English, Greek, German and Japanese) to reach users interested in our specific categories
• We’re self-funded

It’s not unusual for online travel startups to take longer to succeed than startups in other industries:

Skyscanner started in 2002, first funding £2.5M in 2008, exit in 2016

Trivago started in 2005, partial exit in 2012, IPO in 2016

Booking started in 1996, was acquired by Priceline in 2005 and slowly became the #1 OTA

Our plan is to grow organically without external funding, but the effects of the pandemic (travel slowdown worldwide for 2-3 years) might change our plan in order to be able to improve our product significantly during these years.