RootRez Successfully Closes Funding Round to Usher in Booking at the Local Level
Salt Lake City, October 4, 2022 – RootRez, a lodging booking SaaS company helping destination tourism organizations connect their marketing efforts to their lodging constituents and drive local economic demand, secured $1.8M in Series Seed funding. The round was led by Utah-based GW Capital and Peak Capital Partners to support the rapid growth and further accelerate adoption. RootRez now powers over 50 cities across the US and Canada, including Atlanta, Vancouver, Salt Lake City, Ottawa, Charlotte, Park City, and Columbus, and many more events and resorts, including the Sundance Film Festival and Alta Ski Resort.
“Covid-19 was a validating period for us,” said Jason Linder, Founder, President, and CEO of RootRez. “While it was no doubt a challenging time to be in the travel space, we grew our SaaS revenues over 300% during the period, retained all clients, and sent tens of millions of dollars of commission-free bookings to our city partners and their eager for occupancy lodging constituents. By layering localized promotions and packages for travelers combined with hotelier business alignment, we’re changing the landscape of lodging e-commerce at the local level. Our clients can now stimulate demand for their destination, service travelers more effectively, and have the attribution data to measure their results. It’s rewarding to be a solution for our partners.”
This new funding will increase RootRez’s engineering, sales, and client support teams and launch into new markets. RootRez, headquartered in Salt Lake City, currently has 17 employees.
“As the industry’s most advanced technology with deep domain expertise and capabilities, RootRez is well positioned for rapid growth, said Jeff Danley, Founder, Chairman, and CIO of Peak Capital Partners. “We’re very impressed with what RootRez has accomplished. We’re thrilled to be a part of this exciting opportunity.”
“We’ve taken a more conservative funding approach than many technology companies,” said Jason Linder. “Instead of large capital raises and growth at all costs, we’re methodically built a strong foundation focused on profitability and technological efficiencies. Our bootstrapped approach taught us to be tenacious and is now paying dividends as we move forward.”
The RootRez Booking Solution has a unique ability to access live rates and availability of hotel, property management, and private short-term rental units through multiple Global Distribution Systems and channel managers, and flexibility to align commission levels to client goals. Reservations pass directly from the destination website to lodging partners. Technology integration partners include Sabre, TravelClick, SiteMinder, Track Hospitality, Escapia, Inntopia, Booking.com, VRBO, Trip Advisor, and Expedia. RootRez has additionally integrated with Utah-based Bandwango to bundle local experiences with lodging reservations.
With RootRez, we now have metrics to understand our destination visitors’ travel patterns, make more informed decisions, and directly measure the results of marketing efforts, said Kimberly Forest, Senior Vice President of Marketing of Visit Mesa. In addition, RootRez has helped us shift high-cost Online Travel Agency bookings to commission-free for our lodging partners, which is perfectly aligned with our mission.
With RootRez, we now have metrics to understand our destination visitors’ travel patterns, make more informed decisions, and directly measure the results of marketing efforts. In addition, RootRez has helped our hotel partners to maximize their revenue by avoiding net rates and commissions that may exist with the multiple platforms available to the consumer, which is perfectly aligned with our mission.
Kimberly Forest, Senior Vice President of Marketing of Visit Mesa
