Serviced-apartment booking platform Urbandoor will provide extended-stay
and relocation lodging options for clients of ATG, the first travel management
company to team with the two-year-old startup. The content will become
available to ATG clients in June.
ATG vendors program manager Georgy Huffman said the company
is thrilled to partner with Urbandoor. "Our business travelers want a
variety of accommodation options."
Urbandoor is a pure tech platform that uses a model similar
to OpenTable; it provides solutions to apartment operators and also enables
corporate customers to book apartments online. CEO Erik Eccles told BTN the
idea for the platform came about because he and his team noticed that, for
trips lasting longer than a week, the lodging decisions are falling more and
more into the hands of the employee, creating concerns around duty of care.
"We saw there was a supply base out there, which is
huge but just incredibly inefficient, which is serviced apartments,"
Eccles said. "There, you can get that institutional quality, that
predictability of a hotel but have something in the neighborhood where you want
it. You can actually have a managed experience and know there's absolute
compliance on the duty of care piece and the employees are getting what they
want."
The thousands of properties on Urbandoor's
platform span more than 500 markets in the U.K. and U.S., and each includes a
full kitchen, workspace, Wi-Fi and housekeeping.
Updated May 11, 2017, 4:35 p.m. Eastern: A previous version of this story misspelled Georgy Huffman's name.