Direct Booking Conversion & Personalisation

PrivateDeal was a Swiss hospitality-tech startup founded in 2017 by Lucien Mauguin and Isabelle Jan inside EHL's Innovation Village in Lausanne, selling a white-label "smart negotiation" widget that sat on a hotel's own website and let guests bid their own price, with an AI algorithm privately accepting or counter-offering to close the booking direct rather than via an OTA. It won marquee Swiss logos — Swiss Deluxe Hotels rolled it out across more than half of its 40 five-star members in 2020 — and a distribution deal with HotelREZ in 2021, and it built an advisory board including Apaleo's Ulrich Pillau and TrustYou's Jakob Riegger. The company did not survive: PrivateDeal SA (CHE-132.791.145) was declared bankrupt by the Lausanne district court on 12 October 2023, proceedings closed in 2024, and the entity was struck from the Swiss commercial register. As of July 2026 privatedeal.com no longer serves a product site — it 307-redirects to an Afternic domain-for-sale lander, and the last Wayback capture of the live site is September 2025.

Conversion-optimisation suite for hotel websites: live rate comparison against OTAs, price-match messaging, exit-intent offers and booking-abandonment recovery, deployed as widgets on the booking path.

The Hotels Network (THN) is a Barcelona-based hospitality technology company founded in 2015 by Juanjo Rodriguez that sells a direct-booking growth layer installed as a script on a hotel's own website. Its core is predictive personalisation and conversion tooling — price comparison, exit-intent messaging, A/B testing, dynamic content swaps and AI agents (KITT, Superpilot) — plus BenchDirect benchmarking and rate-parity monitoring. Critically, it also ships a Vouchers & Gift Cards module selling gift cards, refund vouchers and reward vouchers in multiple currencies with redemption tracking inside THN's own platform. Lighthouse, the London-headquartered commercial-intelligence unicorn, acquired THN in April 2025 and now markets it as the marketing arm of a single hotel commercial platform.

Triptease is a London-based "data marketing platform" for hotels whose single purpose is shifting bookings away from OTAs onto the hotel's own website. Its core mechanic is rate intelligence: it shops OTA prices in real time, auto-matches or beats them on the hotel's site and on metasearch, and surfaces personalised on-site messaging to push browsers into the direct booking engine. Around that sit metasearch and paid-search bidding, display retargeting, abandonment email with segmented push into the hotel's CRM, AI chat, and Date Boost for demand-sensitive dates. It is sold to revenue, e-commerce and marketing managers on fixed licence or pay-per-stay/CPA terms, and is distributed partly through CRS channels — Sabre SynXis customers get a free "Price Check Lite" tier via the Aven Hospitality partnership.

Booking.com's former suite of hotel-facing tools — websites, booking engine, rate intelligence — assembled from acquisitions and discontinued in November 2020 when Booking Holdings refocused on its core OTA business, leaving dependent hoteliers to migrate at short notice.

Modern API-first cloud PMS and 'hospitality operating system' with a large marketplace of integrated apps. Beyond the PMS core it ships Mews Distributor (its own commission-free booking engine, served from app.mews.com/distributor/<id>), Mews Payments, Mews POS and Mews Kiosk. Named #1 PMS by Hotel Tech Report three years running; widely deployed across European boutique and mid-scale hotels, including small independent Alpine houses.

German hotel software house and web agency (Offenburg, Baden). Product line: vioma CST7 (reservation/administration system), vioma BOOKING (its IBE / booking engine, embedded via the VRI widget), vioma CHANNELS (channel manager) and vioma VOUCHER (online gift vouchers). Also builds hotel websites, so at many clients it owns the site AND the booking path AND the voucher shop. Managing directors Gerald Sandu and Swen Laempe; HRB 472438, Amtsgericht Freiburg.