Introducing Room 77

February 24, 2011

Today, we’ve officially unlocked Room 77, giving travelers their own set of keys to the world’s first hotel room search engine. We built Room 77 for one very simple reason: to help travelers find the best hotel rooms.

While there are countless sites that provide information about hotels, none focus exclusively on hotel rooms — that is, until today. Think about it: each hotel stay involves a crapshoot. You roll the dice at the front desk, and a room is selected for you; until you step foot into your assigned room, you have no idea whether that room is well-suited to your needs. Room 77 takes the element of surprise out of this process and tips the balance of power to you, the traveler. In other words, by opening up the black box of room assignments, we’re empowering travelers and giving them more control over their own room decisions.

Room 77 recognizes that every traveler has unique needs. That’s why you can use our preference-based filters to find the rooms that suit your preferences for high or low floor, distance from elevator, views and need for connecting rooms. Our system ranks each room based on how closely they match your preferences, showing you rooms that are a “strong”, “fair” or “weak” match. The real magic, however, is in our virtual Room View, where we simulate the actual view you might see out of that room window. Our engineers have spent many sleepless nights on the patent-pending algorithm for this feature, because let’s face it: what’s worse than stepping into a nice room, only to see that it faces a garbage dumpster? The best part is that it’s easy to have this data on hand with you the next time you check-in to a hotel: just download our free iPhone app.

We’ve got a lot of really smart people working on this effort and have logged a lot of hours (and a lot of miles).  So far, Room 77 has indexed more than 425,000 hotel rooms, but we won’t stop until we index all hotel rooms at top properties (3~star and above) worldwide. By our estimates, that’s approximately 5 million rooms in 25,000 hotels and resorts!

To get there, Room 77 is counting on your help. If you see a hotel marked “coming soon” on our site, help us “sleuth it.” Just upload a photo of the hotel’s exit floor plan (usually posted on your door), and during your next hotel stay, rate and review your room.

There’s much more in store for you, so we invite you to stay connected through Twitter (@Room _77), Facebook and by following this blog.  And, please don’t be shy with your feedback.

The welcome mat is out — please come on in.

Brad Gerstner, Founder & Chairman of Room 77

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=777370653 Adam Healey

      Brad, congrats on your launch, ahead of schedule! We’ll be paying close attention to your progress :-) Any plans for an API?

      Cheers,

      Adam
      hotelicopter

      • Roger Wong

        Adam, definitely something we’re considering and thanks for the compliment!

    • ATSE

      Hi, I wanted to say thank you for creating this site. I had been searching for site like yours for years! and I finally found it! I look forward to different ways that the users can possibly contribute. Great work!

    • Mike Fridgen

      Nice launch R77 team! Will be using the product and rooting you all on!
      Mike

    • Egluka

      I love the idea of Room 77 but… it doesn’t include the criteria that really matter to me when I travel (about 150 hotel nights a year). In order of priority:
      1. No smoking — that one’s easy
      2. No connecting doors (your choices are “yes” or “don’t care”). I do care, and I definitely don’t want one.
      3. Away from street and other noises

      The rest of the criteria are irrelevant to me (floor, beds, view). Hopefully you’ll include those in the next release. I’ll look forward to it!

      • Room 77 Team

        Thanks so much for your feedback!

    • Anonymous

      I think this is a viable product, but you have a lot to overcome.  First, a “view” doesn’t matter to everyone, as I’m sure you’re hearing.  For those people to whom it does matter, your website is too cold. They want warm and fuzzy online too.  As an example, look at http://www.roomswithgreatviews.com.  They aren’t a booking platform, but they post photos of views from rooms.  AND it’s warm and inviting.  You should buy their site and combine the two.
      The second thing to overcome is that you can find the view you want but you can’t book THAT room. And that’s going to be a problem with all the large hoteliers. So what if floor 12 has great views if they put you on floor 6.   Frankly, I don’t see anyway to overcome that.

      And finally, there are no boutique entries, which a lot of people who want a “view” gravitate toward.  Maybe you can find a way of incorporating smaller venues, albeit high end lodgings, into your platform.  Exclusive places like Ladera Resort on St Lucia (just as an example of high end with a great view).

      • Room 77 Team

        Thanks for your feedback! You’re right — views aren’t the only thing people care about, which is why it’s just one of the room aspects we feature on our site. We also do have several boutique hotels, as we’re focused on 3 – 5 star hotels throughout the world. Happy travels!