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San Mateo, CA (June 8th, 2012) – Guestmob a startup created by serial software entrepreneurs announce the public release of its next generation hotel booking website (www.guestmob.com) for the top 20 US metropolitan markets. Guestmob is re-inventing the opaque hotel booking model created over 15yrs ago, by using big data, social data & predictive algorithms to deliver consumers the best value on top hotels in the US and beyond, while eliminating the constraints of existing models.

Guestmob’s system relies on a simple yet fundamental innovation: hotel collections.  These are small groups of 4-8 highly rated hotels, in the same location, same star rating that Guestmob spends hours reviewing to ensure quality & consistency.  The company then uses a magic pricing algorithm that applies machine learning to various of supply, demand and social signals to offer these collections at prices up to 50% lower than the best available online rates for the same hotels, on the same dates, from other popular online booking and meta-search sites.

Guestmob’s approach enables it to offer quantifiable savings, without any of the restrictions found in today’s discount models: no secret hotel, no last minute booking, no bidding,. Users can easily review the collection’s properties, knowing that upon booking confirmation, Guestmob guarantees one of the hotels in the collection. While booking, users know the hotels, the discounted rate vs the publicly available rate, and they have the flexibility of getting a refund, if plans change.

After a successful soft launch in San Francisco this past fall, Guestmob is expanding its platform to 20 new markets: New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Portland and Phoenix.  Users traveling to these cities will be able to book hotel collections for 3-5 star properties at prices not available anywhere else online. Guestmob’s collections typically include major brands and occasionally some boutique names as well.

“Guestmob is a unique balance of manual curation and algorithmic pricing.  On one hand, we spend hours reviewing hotels to ensure quality & consistency, a task best suited for human judgment, on the other, we push the envelope with software algorithms and math to find the optimal price point”, said Yann Ngongang, CEO of Guestmob.  “For travelers with a little bit of flexibility, we deliver significant savings.”

Guestmob’s approach involves a new back-end auction model for participating properties.  The company’s fulfillment system solves a timing problem for hoteliers.  Hotel revenue managers can maximize their direct sales via their own direct channels and release excess inventory to Guestmob at the best possible time, when there is the least amount of channel conflict.