HotelTonight Launches Its Seven-Day Advance Reservation System

HotelTonight, the app known for offering same-day hotel bookings, is moving beyond those same-day bookings by allowing users to make their reservations up to a week in advance.

TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook reported earlier this week that this move was in the works, but now HotelTonight is confirming the news, and app updates with the new feature are scheduled to go live … now.

Co-founder and CEO Sam Shank told me that HotelTonight is expanding its model “from a position of strength,” with the existing business already profitable and growing 100 percent year-over-year. At the same time, he said this is a natural way “to bring the HotelTonight approach to hotel booking to more people and more times.”

Why seven days, and not, say, two weeks? Or a month? Shank described this as “the Goldlilocks of bookings windows.” After all, he suggested that “last minute” can mean different things to different people, and booking a weekend getaway on Tuesday or Wednesday can still feel pretty spontaneous. When you’re a week out, you start to have more information, like the weather forecast, that can help with planning those trips.

Similarly, from a hotel’s perspective, a week ahead of time they usually have a decent sense of whether they’re going to fill up, or if it makes sense to offer discounted rooms through a service like HotelTonight, though they might add or take rooms off the service as the week goes on.

Other new features include the aforementioned weather forecast, and hotel “playlists” built around certain themes, like hotels that offer great beach getways that weekend or places to stay if you want to watch the big football game.

More broadly, Shank said the company is “moving from this niche of a very compressed period of itme to a broader period of time,” which should help “shift more of the bookings from the legacy [online travel agencies].” At the same time, he said there’s still “so much more to do during that booking window,” so there are no plans to expand beyond seven days.

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