Dutch hospitality startup Drop.in raises funding for its digital guest journey software
Drop.in has raised a pre-seed funding round from 3XA, ASIF Ventures, GraduateEntrepreneur and private investors for its digital guest journey software. The startup offers a unique web based guest app for hotels that enables them to provide their guests with a seamless, autonomous guest experience to cater the next generation hotel guest
Drop.in builds hotel guest apps that caters to the next generation traveller
About Drop.in
The company was founded in late 2021 by Derek de Jonge van Zwijnsbergen and Tjibbe Beckers. The founders met during an incubation program in Amsterdam and noticed a huge problem in the hotel industry. Hotels are under enormous pressure due to the rising staff shortages forcing their personnel to deliver the same service with less staff. Hotel personnel often rely on old software that isn’t equipped to service guests with an autonomous, seamless and digital experience.
The opportunity
The opportunity for hotels lies in the changing guest profile. What used to be a high touch industry is now becoming more autonomous and self service oriented since the arrival of home sharing platforms. A recent report showed that 71% of guests prefer to stay at a hotel that offers self-service technology to manage their stay instead of being fully dependent on staff members. This shows that the hotel guest of the future doesn’t want to rely solely on staff members anymore, but also on software to manage their stay.
At first, hotels didn’t care too much about offering digital guest journeys. This changed rapidly in 2020 when COVID19 changed the industry. The pandemic cleared the way for digital guest solutions and hotels' mindset toward digitization shifted. What long has been regarded either as taboo or impersonal, quickly became necessary.
Now, in order to combat the staff shortages and cater to the changing guest profile, it has become essential for hotels to invest in technology that offers autonomous guest journeys and take pressure off their staff members. Hotels are ready to innovate but lack the resources to build their own systems that match the quality of the hotel apps from the world’s biggest hotel brands. Existing solutions often still require a download to use which leads to low adoption rates. The next generation traveler wants to have a seamless guest experience, and hotels want to unburden staff members as much as possible. This is exactly where Drop.in comes in.
What Drop.in does
Drop.in offers hotels to have extra virtual staff members on demand that enable even the smallest hotels to create an autonomous guest journey. Their app is completely web based, branded in the style of the hotel and creates a seamless experience that takes pressure off staff members and services the guests through three main functionalities:
1) Online check-in & check-out
2) Mobile roomkey for keyless entry
3) Digital concierge for ordering products, accessing information and reserving activities
Drop.in needed a partner that shared this vision for guests becoming more autonomous through a seamless guest experience and understood that hotels need this kind of software to take pressure off their staff. Conscious Hotels from Amsterdam is at the forefront of innovation within the hotel industry and became their launching partner earlier this year. Beside entering the Dutch market, the founders are looking to take drop.in abroad and already are in the process of onboarding their first hotels from Switzerland and Austria.
The investment
Investors Quinty Vermeer and Ties Hagemeijer declare: “As ASIF Ventures, we are pleased to participate in the pre-seed round of Drop.in. From the first conversations onward, we were impressed by Derek and Tjibbe; their professionalism as well as their vision to disrupt the hotel industry is inspiring”. Investor Joris Koch adds “Drop.in’s early traction was the perfect signal to team up with the founding team and make Drop.in a success.”
The funds will be used to accelerate its product development, add more integrations with existing hotel systems and expand its customer base to outside of the Netherlands. The amount of this round remains undisclosed.
References:
https://www.asif.ventures/portfolio
https://www.graduate.nl/portfolio/derek-de-jonge-van-zwijnsbergen-tjibbe-beckers
https://siliconcanals.com/crowdfunding/drop-in-raises-fresh-capital/
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