We built the platform we wished we'd had.
Two operators — an ecommerce builder and a hospitality commercial lead — who got tired of watching the stay run on guesswork. So we connected it.
It started with a check-in that wasn't checking anything.
“Why is there no single platform that digitizes the whole guest journey, connects it, and puts the operator back in charge?”
A few years ago the two of us were renting out vacation homes in Spain. We hired someone local to handle check-ins. Months in, we found out she was quietly running her own business on our guests: massages, boat tours, yacht charters, private chefs. We only noticed when guests started asking us whether it was normal, and whether they should pay her in cash.
She also wasn't checking when flights actually landed. She would drive out, let herself in, and sit in an empty house waiting for guests who were still in the air. Then she billed us for the hours.
The stay was full of activity. Questions, money changing hands, a guest experience being shaped in real time. And as the owners, we had no visibility and no control over any of it.
Between us we had ecommerce, product and hospitality backgrounds, so the question wrote itself. That question became HolidayHero in 2022.
We didn't get it right the first time.
The first version of HolidayHero went to market and stalled. Hospitality is a deeply technical space, and without the right integrations we couldn't get signed-up hotels live fast enough. Deals we'd won, we lost again.
So we paused. Hjalte, who is also our developer, kept building — the integrations, the data layer, the platform — into roughly the shape it has today. In May 2026 Ro joined as commercial co-founder to give it a fresh push, and this is the company you're looking at now. We think being straight about that is the point, not a footnote.
A builder and an operator, pointed at the same problem.
Hjalte built and ran his own webshops, then joined SEO Shop — later acquired by Lightspeed — where he managed around 15% of all ecommerce shops in the Netherlands and roughly €50bn in business revenue. He's deep in AI and agents, and he builds the platform. On any given day he's probably somewhere inside Claude, figuring out what the next agent should do.
Ro studied hotel management, spent around ten years at Nespresso Professional building global B2B customer lifecycle programs, then ran revenue and sales at Tiqets — the ticketing platform behind the Colosseum, the Louvre and the Empire State Building — scaling travel tech worldwide. A lifelong traveler, he's slightly obsessed with consumer psychology and how guests really interact with brands.
One of us thinks in systems and agents, the other in guests and growth. HolidayHero lives exactly where those two meet.
Five things we're sure of.
The best hospitality is a blend of smart technology and real face-to-face moments. We're not here to remove people. We're here to hand time back, so your team spends it on the guest in front of them instead of the tab in front of them.
Most guest-experience tools do one thing well: just messaging, just upsells, just a digital guidebook, just reviews. That leaves the operator stringing five disconnected tools together. We think the whole journey — before, during and after — should live in one connected system.
Some guests want WhatsApp. Some want to call. Some want to browse a beautiful app and be inspired. We don't force one channel, because guests switch between them however they feel. We pull answers through chat, we push inspiration through the app, and all of it becomes data you own.
An OTA captures the booking and effectively rents it back to you, keeping the guest so it can re-sell them and earn commission again. We're the opposite. We take no commission on your guests. The data is yours, you can request all of it any time, and we win by staying worth it — not by locking you in.
Cliché, and true. With AI, an efficient company behind it, and honest pricing, we can hand a 30-room independent the same guest-experience capabilities the big chains spent millions on. Democratizing that is most of the reason we exist.
Handheld, not hands-off.
The honest fear is real: an AI agent could say the wrong thing to a guest and you'd only find out once the damage is done. So we don't hand you an agent and wish you luck.
We give the AI as much context and as many guardrails as possible up front — including your own past conversations marked good and bad — so it starts closer to your voice. When it gets something wrong, you correct it and it does better next time. It's a lot like training a new member of staff.
When the agent is about to cross a boundary you've set, it stops, flags it, and waits for you. How much stays human is entirely your call: some of our hotels already run guest messaging, check-in, check-out and in-stay ordering fully automated, others keep a person closely in the loop.
And your data stays yours. It sits on our servers so the platform can work, but you can request everything at any time and we'll happily hand it over. We're a software partner, not an OTA. We don't monetize your guests.
We're just getting started.
Automate a workflow in plain language, or start from a template that already learned from what works across other properties. More hotels, smarter templates.
A guest can call the property and be answered the same way our chat answers them now — more off your team's plate, still one system.
Integrated with the biggest PMSs while staying in our lane: the guest experience, PMS-agnostic, running beside whatever you already use.
We're building HolidayHero as an AI-first company — scaling through agents and technology, not headcount, because we practice exactly what we sell. It's how one person here does the work of ten, how we keep the price genuinely accessible, and how we intend to keep challenging the incumbents.
We're not another tool. We're your partner in the stay.
Our job is simple to say and hard to do: don't add work, take it away, and make the guest's stay richer while we're at it. If that's the kind of partner you've been looking for, come see it run on your own stay.