“Can a mobile-only booking model work before mobile bookings are the norm?”

HotelQuickly

Co-founder · Founding through scale and exit

Co-founded an app-only last-minute hotel booking platform and scaled it from a single Asian city to an 18-country footprint.

Context

Last-minute hotel booking as a mobile-first, app-only product was an unproven model in Asia-Pacific. Every new market meant re-solving supply, demand and local trust from close to zero — and all of them were hard, against an incumbent like Agoda and at a moment when booking a hotel on a phone was still unusual. App-only was, with hindsight, slightly early. The underlying bet was not: Southeast Asia did buy on mobile first, and the same behaviour later shaped how Shopee took on Lazada.

Action

Co-founded the company and helped take it from concept to a live, multi-market marketplace.
Led expansion into new cities and countries, building repeatable playbooks for hotel supply acquisition and local demand generation.
Helped raise capital to fund the international expansion and scaled the team to support it.

Result

Expanded from roughly 5 cities to 18 countries.
Reached roughly US$150M in cumulative gross merchandise value.
Grew the team from roughly 6 to 120 people.
Raised US$5.65M across two funding rounds.
The company was later sold; the acquirer shut it down years afterward, under its own ownership.

Lesson

Geographic expansion can move quickly, but operational complexity compounds with every market.

The public record

The Skift piece is here deliberately. It covers the company's 2018 collapse, which happened years after the sale and under the acquirer's ownership — anyone researching HotelQuickly will find it, so it belongs next to the case rather than behind it. GMV and team-size figures are as supplied; the US$5.65M raised matches the public record exactly.