HotelTonight Acquires PrimaTable, Plans For More Personalized Hotel Recommendations

Last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight made its first acquisition today with the purchase of San Francisco-based company PrimaTable, a move that will ultimately make reserving last-minute hotels on the site a more personal experience.

The PrimaTable team, which developed last-minute perishable inventory demand forecasting and pricing tools for the restaurant industry, will join HotelTonight’s staff, applying their algorithms to the hotel industry.

Earlier this month HotelTonight released an update to its mobile app, bringing with it personalized hotel recommendations. Where HotelTonight previously only provided three hotel recommendations to users based on his or her current location, the newest version of the app makes personalized recommendations based on what that customer has done in the past, and what users like him or her have enjoyed.

The mobile-only company allows users to book hotels up to 2am each night â€" much later than other hotel discount services â€" and hand-selects each hotel it works with, ensuring a level of quality for users unparalleled by any of the competition.

“The logical extreme of our vision is to just generate one hotel listing,” Jared Simon, Co-Founder and COO of HotelTonight told Mashable.“This is the kind of thing we’ll be able to start to move toward. Much more relevant results for users. Much more rational pricing for hotels.”

Simon says that HotelTonight actually beat out some big public Internet companies who were also interested in PrimaTable.

“This acquisition is the perfect next chapter for PrimaTable. By merging the tools and technology that we built at PrimaTable with HotelTonight’s yield management platform, we’re poised to invent foundational concepts that will drive mobile commerce for the next decade,” PrimaTable Co-Founder Colin Zima said in a statement.

Zima, who spent four years improving Google’s search ranking algorithms, will be taking on the role of HotelTonight’s Data Scientist.

Co-Founder and CEO of PrimaTable Jamie Davidson will join HotelTonight as the company’s Vice President of Product. Davidson also previously worked at Google as one of the quantitative experts charged in charge of optimizing Google’s display algorithm.

“These guys are data scientists. This will give us the ability to really read the data and turn it into actionable stuff, ” says Simon. “The more perfect the information sharing between two parties that want to do a transaction the more it is going to work out in everyone’s favor.”

SEE ALSO: HotelTonight Expands Into Europe, Now Offering Deals in London

Simon sees a better algorithm for determining demand and setting prices to be better for everyone in the long term, ultimately making hotels happier to make rooms available, which will in turn make more rooms and options available for consumers.

“Our philosophy toward our users and our hotels has always been we want to make sure that they make as educated a decision as possible,” says Simon. “We want to give them as much information as we can so that everyone feels like they’re empowered.”

HotelTonight has been downloaded more than 3 million times, and is available in more than 60 destinations across the U.S, Canada, and the U.K. â€"- it’s also coming soon to Amsterdam.

What do you think of HotelTonights’s personalized hotel recommendations, which will now get better with the PrimaTable acquisition? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.