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Skift Take
This marks Guest’s sixth acquisition as it widens distribution channels for property property owners.
Guesty, the Tel Aviv-based property management company, acquired vacation rental tech platform StaySense.
Nashville-based StaySense provides marketing and tech solutions to vacation rental managers. With this deal, StaySense’s technology will be integrated into the Guesty platform to enable direct booking, other distribution channels, and marketing tools for Guesty’s customers.
The companies did not disclose details of the deal, but StaySense CEO David Angotti confirmed that the cash and equity deal was financed by Guesty’s $170 million fundraise last August.
“Joining forces with Guesty is an exciting opportunity for StaySense. We share a common vision for the future of hospitality, and together we can provide more value to our clients so they can continue to provide great guest experiences and grow locally and globally,” Angotti said.
The StaySense brand will be folded into Guesty’s and Angotti and his team will continue to work from its Nashville headquarters.
StaySense started out as a full-service property manager in 2014, managing the rentals for property owners. Angotti and team later sold the management contracts to VTrips in 2016, and retained ownership of its technology, its web brands (SmokyMountains being one of them) and turned the online brands it built to become a niche online travel agency.
“We sold off the owner contracts to VTrips in December 2016. Following that, we leveraged all of the technology and branding that we had built for years and started putting 100 percent of our efforts into building demand channels and technology platforms.,” Angotti said.
StaySense is Guesty’s sixth acquisition — others include hotel-focused revenue and channel manager YieldPlanet; hotel-focused Queensland-based HiRUM; and property management software companies Kigo (based in Spain), MyVR and Your Porter.
But the Israeli company has a litigious past. In March 2020, New York City sued the firm stating that its business model is “focused on helping people flout laws against short-term rentals.” In the lawsuit, the mayor’s office sought records and testimony to determine the impact of Guesty’s business on the New York’s housing market and neighborhoods.
Following that, according to a court filing in July, Guesty and the city negotiated a confidentiality order “to allow for the production of agreed-upon records at this time, accommodating both the city’s investigative needs and Guesty’s confidentiality concerns.”
Note: This article has been updated to reflect Guesty’s list of acquisitions. An earlier version of the article said StaySense was its seventh acquisition.
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