Cutting corporate travel costs by paying employees to host colleagues

Roamr is a corporate travel accommodation platform that helps companies cut costs by paying employees to host their colleagues instead of footing expensive hotel bills.

Under Roamr’s B2B proposition, companies can save about 30 per cent on accommodation costs while both the employee host and the person staying with them get a cut of what would otherwise have been spent on hotel rooms.

By its nature, the Roamr platform will work worldwide and will be of particular interest to companies with distributed teams. Staying with colleagues will also encourage more in-person collaboration and bonding, says Stephen Dooley who cofounded the company with Jason O’Gorman in 2023.

“Corporate travel accommodation expenses have become insanely high with hotel prices growing 10 per cent year on year,” Dooley says. “At the same time, how we work has changed with 97 per cent of tech companies now offering employees location flexibility to attract talent and boost engagement.

“The sticking point is that while working from a different location sounds great, the cost of doing so can be prohibitive, especially if someone is paying rent or a mortgage at home. This pain point is the other side of Roamr. Our platform also provides employees with a way of swapping their homes for free with colleagues either for personal trips or for ‘workcations’ so they can make use of location flexibility policies.”

Roamr isn’t going to suit all business travellers or all companies, but the founders believe it’s a perfect fit for budget-conscious start-ups and tech companies that typically employ big cohorts of millennials and Generation Z-ers who are already comfortable with the concept of the shared economy.

Dooley says the ground has been well prepared for Roamr by companies such as Uber and Airbnb which have made consumers savvy about sharing.

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Booking a stay on Roamr looks very much like booking a stay on any other accommodation platform except the details are only shared between colleagues within the same organisation. There are photos and a list of amenities for each property and bookings are made with a simple click.

Harnessing the power of the shared economy is a subject close to Dooley’s heart as he spent four years (as part of a PhD in financial technology) doing a deep dive into how the process of building the trust, that’s been central to the rapid adoption of the sharing model, is created. O’Gorman is a software engineer who has spent the past decade helping travel and hospitality start-ups such as RentalMatics and Cloudbeds get off the ground.

“Between us we’ve a lot of professional experience in fintech, travel and the adoption of sharing economy platforms while at a personal level we’ve felt the pain of being locked out of the opportunity to spend time working away by exorbitant accommodation costs,” Dooley says.

“For example, say a tech firm needs a Dublin-based employee in San Francisco for a month. This would cost the company around $10,000. With Roamr, a San Francisco-based colleague can host them and earn $3,000. The travelling employee also earns $3,000 for choosing Roamr over a hotel and the company saves $4,000. It is a win-win-win.”

Roamr was launched at the end of last year and has a number of paying customers. The company makes its money by charging commission on bookings made through the platform and if its customers want to offer Roamr to their employees as a perk and to arrange personal house swaps, then a SaaS fee applies.

Because of O’Gorman’s background, Roamr’s start-up costs were pinned at about €10,000, which has already been recouped. The company is currently going through the New Frontiers programme at TU Dublin and is in the process of closing out a pre-seed round of €500,000 with handpicked angel investors who bring expert domain knowledge as well as financial backing to the start-up.