About us and why we founded LODGEA
LODGEA GmbH consists of the founders Ricarda Kies and Jan Kammerath in the management and of course the many colleagues who work in our company on our great software. After we, Ricarda and Jan, had passed many stations in our lives in different companies such as e-domizil, TUI, Eurowings, Qatar Airways or HRS, we realized that many problems keep popping up. The same mistakes were made again and again, hundreds of thousands of euros were spent and many tears were shed. We couldn't understand why there was no software like Shopify or WooCommerce for accommodation booking websites. Probably because it is very complicated and requires a lot of industry knowledge. After careful consideration, we, Ricarda and Jan, then decided to develop exactly that and that's how LODGEA GmbH came into being with the software of the same name "LODGEA".
Founded on 2-12-21
The Shopify for accommodations, as easy as retail
We, Ricarda and Jan, had already worked together for a few years at DS Destination Solutions GmbH, a subsidiary of the HRS Group, in Cologne and Munich. In 2020, during the travel industry's worst crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided something had to change. We also saw how big the market for booking websites really was. None of the well-known website builders from Wix or Squarespace had a satisfactory solution for booking accommodation. We wanted to change that with LODGEA GmbH. LODGEA should be a solution that enables everyone to start their own booking portal without any prior technical knowledge. Ricarda already had many years of experience with the development of booking portals and the many challenges. Jan had developed large portals and booking websites himself at Eurowings, Qatar Airways and TUI. The challenge now was to create a solution for everyone. LODGEA was to be a modern, serverless Software-as-a-Service application based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud technology, which at the same time had to be extremely easy to use.
We need the multidimensional search!
In the early days we were fortunate to have many friends and supporters to fall back on. These include well-known experts from the travel industry, experienced technology experts from cloud computing and software development as well as marketing professionals from all areas, especially search engine optimization and social media marketing. We had and have the great honor that our supporters still include well-known entrepreneurs and founders from Germany. Many of our closest confidants knew right from the start: "You need a completely flexible and multi-dimensional search engine!". From her point of view, searching and booking on the Internet was getting so outdated that completely new and flexible search engines were needed, which could only be implemented on the state-of-the-art AWS cloud infrastructure. At the same time, Jan and Ricarda were busy recruiting pilot customers, partners and investors for LODGEA. A grueling start-up period that was a lot of fun but also cost a lot of nerves. Thanks in part to this founding period, LODGEA is now the only software-as-a-service solution in the world that enables self-service to create booking websites. We are and will always be grateful to our supporters.
Müller Medien and DTM Deutsche Tele Medien GmbH have invested
After the first version of LODGEA was published on June 26th, 2021 and the first customers put the software into operation, Jan and Ricarda looked for investors to promote further development of the product and opening up markets. So far, we, the founders Ricarda and Jan, had financed LODGEA GmbH out of our own pockets and with the help of friends and family. Thanks to the support of the Bavarian start-up network BayStartUP, we were able to get in touch with potential experts very early on. Of course, like many young companies, we had to accept a few setbacks and rejection from potential investors. We have always wished to find investors who share our passion for empowering small and medium-sized businesses and at the same time, in addition to financial support, also bring a large network and experience with technology start-ups. We were all the more pleased that we were able to win both the Müller Medien corporate family from Nuremberg and DTM Deutsche Tele Medien GmbH from Frankfurt as investors at the end of 2021. A big dream has come true not only for us, the founders, but also for LODGEA GmbH. We will forever be grateful to the BayStartUP team for accompanying and supporting us on this journey. With the Müller Medien family of companies and DTM Deutsche Tele Medien GmbH, we have found investors who can look back on decades of experience with small and medium-sized customers and unbeatable experience with technology start-ups. For LODGEA GmbH we have found exactly the partners we wanted in both of them.
Modern technology and the best customers in the world
In a world where customers are promised the moon but seldom kept, LODGEA, as an AWS partner, can today deliver state-of-the-art technology to a wide variety of customers. LODGEA customers receive at least 3 major upgrades per year and the software is continuously improved and optimized as a so-called rolling release. All this was and is only possible in close cooperation with our customers. With each update, LODGEA breaks through new boundaries and overcomes the biggest hurdles for our customers. As an AWS partner, we offer the most modern technology and our Stripe cooperation enables various financial services such as payment processing and automatic payout to be seamless. The partnership with many property and channel management systems allows accommodation to be easily connected to LODGEA. Our API allows customers to do whatever they want. And that's just the beginning of the LODGEA story. At LODGEA we have always been and always will be customer and product focused. We want to deal with the challenges of our customers and not with ourselves. At LODGEA, customers don't just pay for software, they are actively involved in the development. We notice every day that our customers appreciate this and we are convinced that we have the best customers in the world.
