What we are doing
Regardless of whether it concerns a business trip or a holiday: a hotel room preferably meets the expectations from your initial booking as much as possible. To assist hotels in offering that ideal image and to help prevent disappointment and dissatisfaction among their guests, we have launched a digital tool that allows hotel guests to select and guarantee their specific hotel room based on a detailed floorplan and room overview for only a small supplement. By linking that information to other characteristics, hotels can work more efficiently, increase their guest experience and achieve greater returns.
Roeland’s story, founder from Expect Me
Everything started with a road trip with my wife through Italy. Due to my experience in the hotel industry, choosing the perfect hotel is very important to me. I’m a real hospitality addict and only want the very best for my family: beautiful hotels, great rooms, nice views… After an eight-hour drive, we arrived at the first hotel. We enjoyed a warm welcome but when the door for our room opened, we were in for a great disappointment: the promised sea view was blocked by a tree. What an anti-climax! I will never forget my wife’s disappointed look at that moment.
From my experience in hospitality, I started thinking about how I could protect others from this disappointment. The evacuation plan you find in hotels on every floor brought me up the idea of developing a tool that allows you to select a hotel room according to your wishes. “If I had been able to view that floor plan in advance, I could have chosen a particular room myself. I would happily have paid a supplement for that.” We are used to this when travelling by plane, why not in a hotel?
The Platform
There are already a number of digital tools that hotels use to upsell guests to a higher room category in the booking process. Expect Me deviates from this because we focus mainly on room allocation within the same category from your initial booking. Thanks to the detailed information we provide for the guest they can make a perfect room choice. As the guest is taken through an intuitive step-by-step process, it is presented with different upsell opportunities along the way.
A couple of days prior to the guests arrival, Expect Me receives the booking information from the Property Management System. Expect Me sends the room selection link to the guests, so that the guests can browse through all available rooms and additional services. After the confirmation, Expect Me automatically updates the booking information with the selected room number and added services.
During the process all data is encrypted and no personal data will be saved unless it’s approved. Our customers expect us to ensure that data is handled very carefully, both from a security and privacy perspective. For this reason we have designed Expect Me from the ground up according the latest industry best practices around security and privacy.
About us
Our company was founded in 2020 by three ambitious founders. The idea of Expect Me started with our founder and CEO Roeland Verhamme who has years of experience within hotels from international chains. After a couple of years he felt that it was time to move on and started his own first company in a small castle near Antwerp. It is clear that he has experience in entrepreneurship and hospitality but he has no clue how software works.
One of his strengths is bringing the right people together. Alone is just alone. You need a strong team, you need to be able to brainstorm about certain challenges.
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For the technical operation of our software we count on our co-founder and CTO Frank Smits. Frank is an IT architect with more than seven years of experience with cloud technology. He is a man with a clear vision of the future, a good friend of Roeland and has a lot of experience in the IT world.
Our third co-founder is the technology group Road21. With their strong network of +20 startups, together with the in-house knowledge and access to technology resources they play an important role within the growth of Expect Me.
Another important factor that accelerates our growth is our strong established advisory board we can count on, consisting of world-class individuals.
And last but not least we are part of imec.istart, the #1 accelerator program in Europe for tech startups. Via imec.istart, Expect Me gains access to an international network of experts, investors, mentors and coaches who help boost the growth of the company.
