Expedia invests $26m in hospitality tech startup Alice
Prior to accepting the CEO role at embattled ride-sharing company Uber, former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi facilitated a $26 million investment round in New York-based startup Alice.
The Series B round brings the total amount raised by the hospitality technology startup to $39 million, and makes Expedia a majority shareholder.
The travel giant, which is yet to announce its new CEO, made an equity investment in Alice in 2015, and led its $9.5 million round last year.
The new funding will be used by the startup to expand its development, product, sales, and customer success teams.
Founded in 2013 and led by Justin Effron, Alice's technology helps hotels manage operations and communicate with guests. The startup has three core products: Alice Staff, a request management tool for hospitality staff; Alice Concierge, a task tracking tool for concierge teams; and Alice Guest, a communication tool for guests to correspond with hotel staff.
Using Alice's suite of products, hoteliers can generate reports for revenue, productivity, and usage, and compare the numbers across across departments and properties.
The products plug directly into property management systems such as IQware, Opera, SMS, Agilysys, and WebRezPro.
Earlier this year, Alice launched Guest Profile, which gives hoteliers a view into the guest experience across their hotel stay, including check-in, requests for amenities and services, and interactions with the concierge team.
The startup also launched Guest Text Messaging, which facilitates text messaging between hotels and guests without requiring an app download, as well as Logbooks, which allows hoteliers to track any physical item belonging to or loaned to a guest.
Alice is also gearing up to launch new features such as SMS automation for text responses to common guest questions.
"It is time for the internet to expand beyond revolutionizing how our hotel partners market and distribute their products into how they work and treat their guests," Expedia president of Lodging Partner Services Cyril Ranque said in a statement.
"Alice is developing smart mobile and cloud technology to fundamentally improve the hotelier and guest experience at scale. That's a revolution worth investing in."
In the last six months, Alice claims to have grown its customer base by almost 200 percent. Customers that have recently signed on include Two Roads Hospitality, Dream Hotel Group, SIXTY Hotels, and NYLO Hotels.
Alice's products somewhat overlap with those provided by companies such as Amadeus, Oracle, and Sabre, which recently revealed that it had been attacked earlier this year.