Getting out there shouldn’t be so hard
We all love travel. Going to a place you’ve never been and doing something new, those are the kinds of experiences that punctuate our lives and make them feel longer and richer.
And because of that, I always thought it was a shame that most travel websites are actually just booking websites. Their main function is to display and rank massive amounts of inventory that match what you’ve been forced to enter into their search box.
Rows on rows of hotels to choose from. Algorithmic pricing that seems like it goes up every time you go to checkout. And if decision fatigue and sticker shock weren’t enough to stop you from taking an adventure, there’s travel insurance and trip planning.
OTAs play an undeniably massive role in the travel ecosystem, but they’re really best at the very end of the travel journey: when you’ve already decided exactly what you want to do.
For a long time I wanted a different kind of travel engine. A platform that lives upstream of booking and can take you all the way from that spark of desire to go someplace, through discovery, and finally shopping and booking. At the same time I wanted a product that put my time at the center of the marketplace. A place where my free weekends are the thing hotels are shopping for.
That’s why I’m building Unscheduled.
Unscheduled makes it easy to take every trip on your list. Explore every coastal village and mountain town. Visit every special resort or glampground you saw on Instagram. You tell us when you’re free and where you want to go, and Unscheduled gets to work looking for the best hotels and rates to make that trip happen and save you money.
We do this in 2 ways:
- Giving hotels a platform to shop for you and send invites directly
- Watching wholesale room rates that aren’t usually advertised publicly
Let’s say you have two weekends coming up when you don’t have anything planned, and you’ve been wanting to explore Mendocino or take the kids to Gold Country. Tell Unscheduled once and you can get a private invite to stay at a fantastic hotel.
Hoteliers deserve a better platform too
Independent hotels pay up to 25% in commission to the major OTAs on their bookings. And on top of that, placement fees and partner programs drive up the cost of finding new guests even more.
Hospitality boils down to how you make someone else feel. The people out there working to keep person-to-person relationships thriving deserve a tool that gives them more control of their available rooms.
For hoteliers, Unscheduled is a reverse OTA, where they get notifications when eligible travelers have listed their trips and can choose whether or not to send a private, discounted offer to fill their unsold inventory.
A little about rate parity
By listing on the big OTAs, hotels make commitments around rate parity. That means they’re heavily restricted in how they can discount rooms publicly. Private channels can give hoteliers more pricing flexibility than public listings. Unscheduled’s reverse booking model helps them leverage that flexibility with a few big advantages:
- It’s a private network. Only members get booking invites.
- Our travelers really want to go. By listing where and when, Unscheduled helps convert latent travel demand to active.
- Everyone can win. Because hotels save by selling a night through Unscheduled vs a traditional OTA, there’s more room for a better price for the traveler and more booking revenue.
Let adventure find you
When you have an open weekend coming up on the calendar, or your PTO is piling up, or maybe you’re like me and just need to get out there, try travel that starts with an invite. Because there are great hotels that would love to host you.