A new startup wants to make booking meetings at trendy hotels as easy as an Uber request.
New York-based Bizly launched its platform for booking hotel meeting rooms in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Companies can book rooms through Bizly’s app or website — with the goal of eliminating the phone calls and price negotiations between companies and hotels.
In Chicago, Bizly lets companies book with four hotels, including The Godfrey, Public Chicago, Kinzie Hotel and the Chicago Athletic Association, with more expected in the next few months. The company launched in beta in January.
One of the meeting rooms at the Chicago Athletic Hotel accommodates 10 people and costs $75 an hour. At the Kinzie Hotel, a boardroom for 14 is priced at $50 to $60.
Founder Ron Shah said with companies cutting down on office space, many aren’t investing in a 20- or 30-person conference room. Meanwhile, many companies have contingents of remote workers who might not have an office to hold meetings.
Shah was an early investor in moviemaking app Directr and music streaming service Songza, both of which were acquired by Google in 2014. He said he began building the company last year after his conference room was under construction and he needed to book meeting rooms at hotels.
In an age of on-demand everything, the process was frustrating for Shah.
“It turned out to be a really painful thing … literally a two- or three-day process,” he said. “That’s when I decided that technology could really make this a lot easier.”
Meeting rooms booked within a week cost $30 to $150 hourly; rooms booked further in advance range from $60 to $300. The company focuses on meetings with 40 attendees or fewer.
Users can search by date and time, compare hotels and prices, and select whether they want additional amenities like food and beverage service, projectors or whiteboards.
“The way we do it, it’s like going to any hotel-booking site,” Shah said.
Competitors include companies like New York-based short-term office-space rental service Breather, which arrived in Chicago in February, and San Francisco-based LiquidSpace.
The Chicago Athletic Association hotel, one of Bizly’s partners, gives the startup a calendar of availability for the following two weeks, then lets users book meeting spaces without speaking to the hotel directly.
“We’re trying to maximize the usage, because sometimes we have a convention in town that’s taking up most of our sleeping rooms but not our meeting space,” said Vicki Poplin, director of sales and marketing at the hotel.
And for companies, it’s designed to be a way to cut down on costs and time spent booking a room.
Ravi Doshi, a commodities trader with Chicago Trading Company, estimates he’s used Bizly to book space for five meetings in Chicago and New York. Though he entertains clients frequently, his office is full of proprietary information, and he says his conference room is “dingy.” But he found it cumbersome to book meeting rooms in hotels.
Bizly made the booking process easier, he said.
“The price is one big thing, and then you have the ease-of-use — opening my app and just doing it,” Doshi said. “It made (booking) accessible to us.”
Bizly recently raised a $1.5 million seed round. Shah said he hopes to expand to Boston, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles in September.
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