​Nightly.travel, the hotel switching platform changing the way people book their stays, receives £150,000 investment

First website of its kind to offer hotel switching allowing travellers to split their stay across two hotels at a single destination.

London-based start-up that has graduated from Y-Combinator’s online Start-up School Founder Track.

March 12, 2018

London: Nightly.travel announced today that it has received early stage funding of £150,000 through Worth Capital’s Start-Up Series Fund.

The London-based start-up is the first website in the world to offer hotel switching, allowing travellers to split their stay across two hotels at a single destination in order to experience more of the cities they visit and save as much as 70% versus staying in a single hotel. The site currently has access to over 59,000 hotels across more than 180 countries.

The idea for Nightly.travel stemmed from co-founder Santiago Navarro’s personal experience with manual hotel switching, a travel hack used by many savvy travellers today to manually search multiple sites and book multiple hotels in one city destination. Santiago used this trick to experience five-star hotels for three-star prices, often amazing his peers. He decided to bring the idea to a hackathon and built the site with his then co-founder Jon Hannah, who has since stepped away from the business but remains involved as an advisor.

Hotel switching, also referred to as a split stay, is already very popular with families booking Disney holidays in Florida, but Nightly.travel is now bringing this new way of booking hotels to all travellers, leading to great coverage from publications such as Cosmopolitan, the Sun, Life Hacker, The Points Guy, and Forbes.

Nightly.travel’s new co-founder David Ferreira joined the company in 2017 after time at Expedia and says: “Our aim is to challenge the idea that one trip has to equal one hotel. When people see how hotel switching can not only save them money but give them even more choices to stay where they want to stay, they are hooked. Under the traditional model, travellers go to one city and are forced to choose one location for their stay. With hotel switching, travellers can experience more amenities from different hotels or get a better feel for a city by exploring more than one neighbourhood. Best of all, they can apply the savings of hotel switching to improving the shopping, eating, and drinking they do while enjoying all their destination has to offer.”

The investment comes after Nightly.travel was entered into the September 2017 Start-Up Series, the UK’s largest ever seed funding search competition – launched in 2017 by London investment promoters, Worth Capital.

Worth Capital has a proven track record of helping new entrepreneurs obtain funds and expertise to help turn their ideas into successful, sustainable businesses. They have helped secure over £3.6m of investment into start-up businesses in the last three years. Previous winners within Worth Capital’s portfolio, including Tart and Air & Grace, have gone on to raise additional funding at more than double their original valuation.

David and Santiago plan to use the investment to improve the site, add more hotels, and boost their digital marketing capabilities, all in the service of exposing more travellers to the site and driving repeat users. “Our aim is to educate as well as inform travellers about hotel switching,” explains David. “We can do single hotel stays as well as hotel switching but it’s fantastic to see how people react when they learn about what Nightly.travel can do for them – it opens lots of new opportunities. Digital marketing will play a huge factor in helping us educate travellers about the benefits of what we’re doing, and we hope they’ll give us a try.”

Media Contact:

Elliott Tugwell

press@nightly.travel

About Nightly.travel

Nightly.travel is challenging the idea that one trip has to equal one hotel by creating the world’s first hotel switching platform that allows travellers to split their stay across two hotels in a city destination. By switching hotels once during their trip, travellers can save as much as 70% vs. a single hotel stay and explore more of the cities they visit. Nightly.travel’s proprietary hotel switching algorithm creates unique hotel combinations by accessing over 59,000 of the world’s best hotels in over 180 countries worldwide. Find out more at www.nightly.travel

About Worth Capital and the Start-Up Series Fund

The Start-Up Series is a competition run by Worth Capital and promoted by startps.co.uk. Each month, the competition finds up to 2 winners who are selected for SEIS investment of up to £150k.

Worth Capital provide investors with the opportunity to invest in ambitious start-ups. The Start-Up Series Fund enables investors to hold equity in a number of businesses, usually winners of the Start-Up Series competition. All the investments are SEIS & EIS compliant. The Fund is managed by Amersham Investment Management Ltd, who are authorised and regulated by the FCA, FRN 507460.