About us and why we founded LODGEA
There's a lot of technology catering to the travel industry in our world. What should be the reason to develop another one? We've spent over 20 years of experience in the travel industry including airlines, hotels, resorts, tour operators, destination management organisations and well known vacation rental agencies. These included private companies as well as government organisations. After that period and the impression that the technology in the travel sector continues to fall behind the technology in retail, it was about time to take matters into our own hands.
It was about time.
Why don't you just build something yourself?
We've built and grew travel e-commerce platforms and the businesses, that go with it, time and time again. Sometimes we built them from scratch and sometimes we had to restructure existing businesses, their technology and marketing. There were projects were we've used expensive standard software and there were projects were we built custom software. Regardless of that, these projects were expensive, took months and meant a lot of effort for everyone involved. In almost all projects, the management, responsible employees and the companies involved asked whether there is no simpler and cheaper solution. Our answer "Not until someone develops it" was responded to with "Well, why don't you develop it yourself?". In 2021, we decided that it's about time for someone to develop it and that this "someone" would be us.
Cloud computing rewrote the rules
The advancement of cloud computing, especially with serverless cloud computing, has led to the availability of almost endless computing resources at extremely low cost. As SaaS products continued to grow and replaced traditional data center installations, it was clear to us that the time had come for a SaaS product in the travel industry. We knew that our solution to easier, cheaper and faster travel e-commerce platforms would have to become a software-as-a-service solution. Our years of experience with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure has had us convinced that these would be the perfect platforms to build on. Never ever again would we buy, rent or install even a single server in a data center. That's how LODGEA was born.
Where is the marketing?
Marketing travel websites doesn't have to be complicated. Many startups have their websites built, and once the happy day of going live is over, weeks of doubt and uncertainty follow. That's because launching a website is just a small firat step and the foundation and beginning of your marketing plan. However, given the distractions of technology, young companies often don't have enough space to set up marketing and get going. If you think the battle with technology is over, you face the challenges of integrating your marketing activities and the remaining search engine and social media optimisations. We believe marketing should be an essential component of any technology in the travel industry, and to this day we are amazed that it is not. We want marketing technology and marketing automation to always be an integrated out-of-the-box component of our solution. Our goal is to avoid our customers experiencing the same frustration and disillusionment that we have watched and experienced for far too long. We want them to be successful.
We've found one another and we're committed
It was during one of these projects were we've built yet another travel e-commerce platform. When COVID-19 struck in 2020, we had very intense discussion on what the big challenges in the industry were on how all of us had experienced the same struggle, pain and frustration over the past years. With the travel industry down to it's knees in 2020, we decided that 2021 would be the year we make the changes we always talked and thought about. Months of planning, specifications, market analysis and development, a lot of discussions with experts and the investor negotiations later, we have arrived and we're here to stay.
