Room 77: Helping Travelers Find the Best Hotel Rooms

Founded in February of 2009 by entrepreneur, investor, and avid traveler Brad Gerstner, Room 77 is a hotel metasearch engine that allows users to find and compare prices from top travel sites including Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com Priceline, Agoda, Get a Room, Orbitz, ReserveTravel, CheapTickets, IHG, and Easytobook.com. Based in Mountain View, California, Room 77 offers the most advanced and comprehensive hotel shopping and booking experience on the web today by letting travelers simultaneously look at multiple hotel room categories and book more than 200,000 hotel rooms around the world. Users start their search by entering a city, hotel, address, or landmark, and refine it based on common filters (location, amenities, price, star ratings) and not-so-common ones (view type, free parking, free breakfast, free Wi-Fi, free airport shuttle). From there, Room 77 takes care of the rest by scouring the web for the best hotel prices, including special rates for motor club members, senior citizens, government employees, and military members.

In addition, Room 77 provides super specific details about each hotel room such as room number, bed type, square footage, distance from elevator, and whether it's adjoining or not. The first travel website to reveal such information, Room 77 gives travelers a better idea of what to expect when they search for hotel rooms. Moreover, the site uses technology from Google Earth to stimulate the actual view from each room. For travelers who book 4- to 5-star hotels or stays more than $400, Room 77's room concierge team will work directly with the hotel to get them the best rooms according to their preferences for view, size, and noise level.

Named the Best Overall Startup at the 2011 Launch Conference, Room 77 today closed its Series C funding round, raising $30.3 million that will be use to scale its product globally. Among the participants in the round were Expedia Inc., Felicis Ventures, Concur Technologies, and Hotwire co-founder Spencer Rascoff.