A new Irish-founded accommodation platform with big-name backers has set its sights on disrupting the world of corporate travel. Joseph O’Connor caught up with Roamr co-founder Stephen Dooley to find out more 

If anyone doubts how groundbreaking Airbnb and Uber have been for their respective industries, just ask Stephen Dooley. He’ll share an anecdote about how, as a child, he was constantly warned against getting in the car with or answering the door to strangers, only to see in adult life two tech companies rip up the playbook. 

Airbnb and Uber’s ability to shift people’s innate behavioural habits struck a chord with Dooley — not only did their trust and adoption strategies form the focus of his PhD research, but they also planted a seed for his start-up. 

So, too, did the pandemic. At that time, Dooley was taken by how many employers were letting staff work from anywhere in the world but also frustrated by the financial barriers making it impossible for most. 

“That was my personal pain point,” says Dooley. “Speaking with friends, they faced the same issue of having to spend thousands on accommodation while paying rent at home. It was probably my PhD research brain that put me in customer discovery mode, and I thought, ‘is there a play here? How do we solve the piece, and what would a solution look like?’” 

These were questions Dooley had when he met Jason O’Gorman through the Y Combinator founders matchmaking programme. With O’Gorman’s decade-long engineering experience building travel and hospitality start-ups, it was the perfect match — and Roamr was born. Seven months later, the pair had a product built for just €15,000 and in the hands of their first paying customers, with an ambitious plan to rip up the business travel playbook. 

A cost-cutting platform 

Roamr is a corporate travel accommodation platform aimed at helping companies cut costs by paying staff to host their colleagues instead of footing expensive hotel bills. Its B2B proposition is to save client companies around 30 per cent on accommodation costs while the employee host and business traveller get a slice of the savings. Roamr’s primary target market is big tech — companies with deep pockets and a global presence. 

“The example we tend to give is a tech company with someone in Dublin,” says Dooley. “They need a person in San Francisco for a month. It’s going to cost $10,000 on hotel bills. Instead, they could be hosted by a colleague or friend in that city, and then we redistribute the would-be hotel cost to those two people’s pockets and back to the company.” 

To break it down further: The host gets $3,000, the travelling employee gets $3,000, and the company saves 30 per cent on the trip cost after paying Roamr a service fee. 

“We use what we’re calling a pay-as-you-save model,” says Dooley. “Unless the company has driven a saving, we won’t charge them. It helps us pitch the CFO in a way that makes it a no-brainer. You get to push 30 per cent of your cost straight to the bottom line, but you get to deliver that news in a way that makes you look like a hero to your workforce because you’ve created financial opportunities for them.” 

Roamr also has a B2C SaaS model, which focuses on personal trips with home exchange. That means employers pay a flat fee to unlock the home exchange service for their staff, many of whom will have a work from abroad policy. 

According to Dooley, the platform’s frontend is not dissimilar to Airbnb — “because familiarity breeds trust” — but the backend is more B2B-focused, complete with a customized dashboard and admin controls for CFOs and chief people officers. 

Big name backers 

The very nature of Roamr’s business means it has massive global ambition, which is also reflected in the big names backing and advising the start-up. They include former MD of Meta Ireland Rick Kelley, Eoghan Quigley of KPMG, former Shopify executive John Riordan and John Collins, formerly of Intercom and Ramp.  

Roamr has also secured partnerships with leading players in the future of work like Deel, Oyster, Dell and Remote and raised over €500,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round earlier this year. 

Dooley says everyone at the cap table has specific expertise that can unlock a different piece for Roamr. “We focused on the blind spots of the business,” he says. “The obvious one was, ‘How does the buyer think about rolling out this technology?’ We need to understand that perception, which is why we built relationships with CPOs in big tech companies like Google, Netflix, Workday and Cisco.” 

While Dooley acknowledges riding the coattails of Airbnb’s disruption of the accommodation sector, he says they offer a very different proposition. “If you travel right now for work, you have a choice. Will I stay in a hotel or an Airbnb? There’s actually not too much of a reason to choose one or the other nowadays. We’re saying, ‘Hey, you can travel for work, and you can have one of those or if you choose Roamr, you get paid. So it’s a strong enough differentiation.” 

The other differentiator is trust. Roamr offers a much more gated community. “It’s not a bunch of college students that are going to come to your home and party while they’re there,” says Dooley. “This person is a working professional. So there’s higher trust in that community for us.” 

Roamr currently has a team of four with plans to use its funding to increase its headcount. It has users in 96 countries, which Dooley says proves its global application. 

“We are unapologetically globally ambitious with this, but you have to be by default,” he says. “The core value proposition is unlocking the globe for people, so you must have that global mindset. Our metric for success is whether when people travel, they’re going to think, ‘Am I getting a Roamr or a hotel or an Airbnb?’ Hopefully, in that order. That probably sounds lofty and delusional, but ultimately, it’s what we need to be.”