The Madrid-based last-minute hotel booking app and European competitor to HotelTonight, raised its first external investment round since being founded in January 2012. The new funds help the company with its expansion plans into Latin America.
Like HotelTonight, Hot Hotels’ mobile apps offer a selection of last minute deals each day to help fill partner hotels’ inventory, while also passing on savings to customers. These span 43 countries and 257 cities in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Israel. Whereas the HotelTonight model is based on direct relationships with hotels, Hot Hotels operates a hybrid model that also sees it contract hotels via third parties — a model it believes scales better since it ties into existing technology platforms used by the hotel and travel industry, essentially redesigning the experience for mobile, and also enabling it to offer a larger inventory of deals compared to others in the last-minute mobile-only hotel booking space.