HotelQuickly Books Your Hotels Really Quickly, Launches in 6 Asian Countries
HotelQuickly is a mobile-only service that helps users book hotels really quickly. It’s available in six countries: Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. It provides four to six hotels for fast picking and booking. These three stars or above hotels are handpicked by the team with up to a 70 percent discount in pricing. HotelQuickly is available both on iOS and Android.
HotelQuickly was founded by five co-founders: Tomas Laboutka (CEO), Christian Mischler (COO), Michal Juhas (CTO), Mario Peng (CFO), Raphael Cohen (CSO). Interestingly, both Christian and Raphael are actually ex-Rocket Internet Asia members. Christian is the former COO of FoodPanda while Raphael was the Managing Director of FoodPanda Vietnam and DropGifts Singapore.
HotelQuickly was officially launched at WebMob’s Thailand Meetup yesterday in Bangkok. From my understanding, it has also raised $500,000 from a group of undisclosed European and Asian angel investors.
What inspired the founders to start HotelQuickly was simple. CEO Tomas Laboutka said that it was a pain to book hotels quickly while on the go, saying “The big boys realized there’s a problem but they are stuck in their old system.”
The startup now has hired 24 people across Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Interestingly, 34 percent of the team are ex-Rocket Internet folks. Four out of five of HotelQuickly’s founders are based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Laboutka said that there are many reasons why Bangkok is a great place to build a company. He feels the startup community is quickly building up with the help of Hubba and Launchpad, which has attracted more attention from investors. People in Thailand are also eager to work and are great designers, though he lamented that there aren’t enough tech-capable graduates for hire. Last but not least definitely, comparing to Singapore, Bangkok is surely a more affordable place to bootstrap.
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