Roomer Lands $5M In Series A To Be The Airbnb For Unwanted Hotel Rooms

Roomer is doing for hotel rooms what Airbnb did for your very own home. According to the startup, which has just raised $5 million in Series A led by Disruptive, there are 81 million hotel room cancellations in the United States every year. Roomer tries to solve that problem by letting users sell their unwanted hotel room, which would otherwise cost a cancellation fee, at a discounted price.

For the user, they avoid paying money for the unwanted room (and they might even make a few bucks), while the hotel makes far more money than they would from a cancellation fee from incidentals like WiFi, minibar, etc.

Roomer sets up through hotels and travel agencies directly, so that each time a user wants to cancel their hotel room, they’re sent to the Roomer site to list it for sale. Roomer handles everything from marketing to reservation transfer to payment out to you, all from simply sending the hotel confirmation email to the service.

The user gets all this for free, and then pays out 15 percent of the sale to Roomer in exchange for the marketing, payments, transfers, etc. And as a bonus, the hotel saves an average of $10.49 each time a cancellation call is instead routed to Roomer, according to founder Gon Ben-David.

I asked Ben-David about the possibility of someone getting entrepreneurial with Roomer and reserving 15 rooms to turn a profit, which would work against the hotels unlike the once-off cancellation.

He said the average discount on a room is 37 percent, which means that most people are just making their money back on the cancellation. In other words, it wouldn’t work well to turn a profit the same way that Airbnb has allowed some to run profitable mini-businesses. In either case, Ben-David says they’re monitoring it.

The biggest challenge to the startup, says Ben-David, is building up supply and demand and truly growing awareness, which is what some of the money will be going toward in the coming months.

To learn more about Roomer, head over to the website here.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...

Kiran Upadhyay

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