Key Takeaways
- Lobby raised USD 2.2 million from Founderful to expand beyond hospitality into new travel verticals.
- The company has developed an AI-driven platform to automate complex group bookings, significantly reducing response times.
- Lobby’s solution increases conversion rates by up to 15% and manages bookings in 30 seconds for large groups with various requirements.
- The platform integrates easily with Gmail, Outlook, and PMS systems, allowing for quick onboarding and options for automation or human oversight.
Lobby has raised USD 2.2 million in funding from Founderful. As part of the investment, Pascal Mathis, Co-Founder of the venture capital firm and of GetYourGuide with wide experience in scaling startups, will join Lobby’s Board of Directors.
After successfully closing the investment round, Lobby will be able to expand beyond the hospitality sector with the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) vertical, experiences and attractions business, cruises and airlines as its main goals.
“Lobby is tackling one of the most complex and valuable segments in travel: group bookings” – says Pascal Mathis, Co-Founder and Partner of Founderful. “What stood out to us is their ability to move beyond surface-level automation and execute workflows across systems. The travel experience of the founder team helps to build a solution which solves a real problem of the industry.”
“Having Founderful’s trust gives us even greater strength to take Lobby to the next level: beyond the hospitality sector and into new verticals across the travel industry” – explains Romy Abbrederis, CEO and Co-Founder of Lobby. “With our engine, we will help our customers automate processes that were previously considered too complex and unlock new levels of efficiency and revenue for them.”
A new standard for group bookings through AI
Lobby has developed an AI-driven platform to address one of the travel industry’s most persistent operational challenges: B2B and group bookings that arrive via e-mail, one of the most important sales channels for hotels, MICE industry, means of transportation, as well as experience and activities. Group bookings are complex and slow to process due to manual workflows. At the same time, they are becoming more relevant for travel providers as they generate higher revenue than individual bookings.
Lobby’s solution automates the entire lifecycle of a group booking request reducing response times by 75 per cent and, therefore, increasing conversion rates up to 15 per cent, more accurate quotes and automated follow-ups on unanswered or declined offers. The company’s AI platform can:
Understand booking intent and requirements in over 100+ languages.
Check availability across systems
Validate contracts and negotiated terms
Select correct rates and pricing logic
Pick up or manage allotments and inventory
Draft tailor-made quotes and RFPs for inbound requests
Follow-up when offers are declined or unanswered
Convert accepted offers into reservations or blocks in PMS
Manage changes, rooming lists and questions until arrival
Draft contextual responses before staff approval or sending
Ensure that payments are completed on time
Lobby turns incoming e-mail requests into accurate bookings in 30 seconds and can manage scenarios such as 300-room group booking across multiple dates, including different room types, dinners, event spaces and ongoing modifications in seconds.
The solution can be integrated with Gmail, Outlook and PMS systems easily. New integrations take an average of four days, while onboarding process takes up to two days. During the implementation of the platform, customers can choose between full automation or a human-in-the-loop model to allow the review and approval of quotes by staff before sending them.