The end of the year is the ideal time to reflect. Looking back on the last 12 months allows you to remember and appreciate everything you experienced and discovered. It’s important going forward to understand what went well and what you learned and then plan the next steps for the following year.
For all of us here at Lodgify, 2022 was an adventure full of triumphs and we ended the year on a high.
As we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we’d love to share our favorite moments of the year and recap all the special milestones we reached, thanks to you, our valued users.
Raised $30M in a Series B funding round
On November 3rd, we were humbled to announce that we had raised $30 million in a highly successful Series B funding round. This is the most significant investment we have ever received.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures and included the participation of Bonsai Partners, Aldea Ventures, and ICF (Institut Català de Finances), in cooperation with our existing investors Intermedia Vermögensverwaltung and Nauta Capital. We were very grateful for their support and expertise throughout the process.
The funding will help us improve our product and enhance the customer experience with additional services and features. We will be able to expand our team with more amazing professionals who will continue to make your business needs our number one priority.
News of our funding round made waves throughout the industry. We were featured in various top media outlets and publications such as Phocuswire, Tech EU, Short term rentalz, and many more.
You can check out our press page to stay up to date with Lodgify news and exciting industry announcements.
Released new Lodgify features and plans
We listened to your feedback and worked hard to deliver new features to help you scale your business, whether you’re a large or small hospitality firm.
Unified inbox
To ensure you keep on top of guest messages and booking requests, we created an industry-leading unified inbox that connects seamlessly with Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, including your own direct booking website.
You can now see all of your guest communication in one simple, centralized platform where you can filter and organize by priority. In addition, you can easily and quickly reply to guests through WhatsApp messages and SMS, saving you time and boosting customer satisfaction.
Freemium plan
We want to empower vacation rental businesses of all sizes to scale up, so we introduced our Lite plan with that in mind. With no monthly subscription fees, hosts have the breathing space to build a website and market their listings without the added commitment. It’s completely risk-free, and you only pay a small commission of 3.9% on confirmed bookings.
New and improved mobile app
Understanding that hosts have busy and dynamic lifestyles, we wanted to design a mobile app that allows you to manage your vacation rental on the go. It has a modern and intuitive dashboard that lets you quickly see your scheduled bookings and access the unified inbox.
Furthermore, you can create and edit bookings and block dates in the user-friendly calendar, as well as accept new bookings, request payments, and so much more!
Improved connectivity with Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com
Our customers can now receive, reply to, and manage Airbnb and Vrbo inquiries directly from Lodgify. Plus, we’ve improved our messaging integration with Booking.com and you can now communicate with guests directly instead of using email threads. These updates provide better performance and reliability on our channel integrations.
You can now build your website in 5 easy steps
Users with an incomplete website can now go to the dashboard to complete their website in five easy steps. Having a fully functional site in a matter of seconds is now possible!
Other improvements:
- The internal name feature allows our users to permanently name and identify their rental the way they want to inside their Lodgify account.
- Our users can now send automatic notifications based on their rentals’ timezone and assign responses to multiple recipients, channels, and rentals.
- Users can now define commission rate calculation rules for each channel in the advanced settings of our accounting module.
- Improved our pre-check-in form and rental guides.
- We’ve fully released all of our new templates and are no longer in beta.
- The properties’ dropdown on our templates has been improved. Multi-property customers can easily select and view the properties they want to show on their Lodgify websites.
Renewed our preferred partner status with leading OTA’s
We are proud to continue to be recognized by some of the biggest names in the business as a preferred partner. Maintaining effective working relationships with Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia, and Booking.com throughout 2022 and beyond allows us to ensure we have a state-of-the-art vacation rental channel manager and ensure our customers stay connected to the world’s most popular OTAs.
Integrated with new partners
We teamed up with several new partners to maximize the Lodgify experience and provide you with even more cutting-edge industry features. These additional integrations will streamline your vacation rental management and keep your business ahead of the competition.
Boostly is a website and marketing agency specializing in website creation and increasing direct bookings for property owners and managers in the short-term rental industry. Their WordPress websites now integrate with Lodgify’s booking engine.
Check-in Scan automatically collects your guest registration information and ensures you comply instantly with local tourism laws and police regulations in Spain and Portugal.
Enso Connect is a guest experience operating system where you can create a digital guest book, sync to smart home devices, and create a CRM with sentiment analysis and AI communication.
InsuraGuest provides quick and transparent vacation rental insurance with a simple claims process and fast payouts. Hosts can start and pause coverage when they need it and share the costs with their guests.
Jervis Systems allows you to automate your property access needs by creating unique pin codes for your smart lock for each confirmed booking you receive. These are sent to your guests before arrival day, allowing for a seamless check-in process.
Safely offers short-term rental protection and comprehensive guest screening that will help you to identify problem guests before they book. It also provides quick and easy claim payments and covers home and contents damage, theft, bodily injury, and travel insurance.
Stasher is a free app for your guests to search for and find a safe and convenient place to leave their luggage before check-in or after check-out. Moreover, you can earn a 10% commission on storage bookings by sending your Stasher link to your guests.
TIDY offers automated cleaning and maintenance solutions for your vacation rental property. The app can schedule cleaners between reservations and allow hosts to customize and delegate tasks to staff.
Turno puts your turnover tasks on autopilot by automatically scheduling cleaning tasks after every check-out and helps you find a verified cleaner in your area.
If you are already a Lodgify customer, you can connect to the above integrations and more from your Apps page.
We published our first blog post in 2014 and haven’t stopped since! We treat our customers as business partners; if you grow, we grow. So we love sharing everything we know about the industry to help you thrive.
Here are some of the best content initiatives we’ve released this year:
– We developed a bunch of tools this year, such as the Airbnb description generator and the review generator. Plus, a quick survey that recommends the best plan for your business.
– We interviewed some of our customers that have grown their businesses with Lodgify. You can watch their interviews here or read all about their stories here.
– We released three new online courses this year about using SEO to get into Google’s first position, using social media to promote your vacation rental, and how to boost your listings with great pictures.
– We started posting a lot more on our social media channels, especially on Linkedin and TikTok.
– We continued to release industry reports and several guides and templates to boost your vacation rental business.
New collaborations with industry stakeholders
To give our readers and customers the latest and best insights into the short-term rental industry, we hosted webinars with some of the most renowned vacation rental experts.
The year’s highlights include our interviews with Matt Landau from VRMB, Christophe Salmon from Revyoos, and the hosts of the “Thanks for Visiting” podcast, Annette Grant and Sarah Karakaian. As well as webinars with industry influencers and partners.
We will continue to collaborate with the industry’s best minds in 2023.
Received love and support from our customers
Throughout the year, we received over 500 positive reviews and achieved an impressive average review rating of 4.6/5, based on reviews and ratings across global review platforms. We appreciate all the feedback we receive, whether it’s good or bad, and we are especially grateful to those who left positive comments regarding their Lodgify experience.
You can find and compare us online by checking out the reviews from users of our software here.
Won multiple hospitality software awards
2022 also saw us confirmed as a leader in the vacation rental and hospitality industry thanks to being recognized among the highest-rated software solutions by prestigious software recommendation sites.
Lodgify was awarded “Established player” status for three categories: Vacation rental software, Hospitality property management software, and Channel management software by Capterra.
In addition, we were given “Champion” status by the software comparison site Crozdesk and “FrontRunner” status for Hotel management software by Software Advice.
Grew our team and celebrated together
After the pandemic hiatus, we were finally able to meet again in person and celebrate two special company events. The first one came in May when we flew all our employees to our HQ in Barcelona and organized a full week of events. This included brainstorming, training, strategy, knowledge-sharing sessions, and a diversity & inclusion workshop.
For the second, we celebrated our 10th anniversary with an incredible 1920s-themed party full of amazing costumes, genuine casino games with professional croupiers, and wonderful cuisine before dancing the night away.
Not only that, we have an internal team that’s made up of a group of volunteers that organize events to promote team spirit. Throughout the year, they organized game nights, foosball and volleyball tournaments, vermouth tasting, an online escape room, and much more.
In one year, we went from having a team of 122 employees to over 200. The biggest team is the R&D and product team, who continues to deliver the best vacation rental software in the industry.
We also incorporated a new business entity and built a team in the U.S. Due to our flexible hybrid remote and fully remote conditions, we now have employees working from Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Argentina, Venezuela, Romania, Bosnia, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Andorra, Poland, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Turkey, Andorra, France, Jordan, India, Mexico, Iran, Brazil, and Portugal. And we’re expecting to grow a lot more!
Here’s to even more success in the new year!
Since the beginning of 2012, we’ve strived to deliver a product that would empower hosts to start and grow their own short-term rental businesses with the help of our vacation rental software.
Fast forward a decade, and we’re thriving and focused on the same mission.
We’d like to THANK YOU for making 2022 such a great year, and we’re looking forward to continuing to support you in 2023.
P.S. If you haven’t tried Lodgify yet, sign up for our free trial below! Or book a demo call with one of our agents to get a run-through of our product here.
