HotelQuickly lays off part of marketing team, says it’s part of its growth plan

Photo credit: HotelQuickly.

Last-minute hotel booking app HotelQuickly is going through an overhaul in its marketing department, Tech in Asia has learned.

We’ve heard from sources that the company had made layoffs. HotelQuickly CEO Tomas Laboutka confirmed this, saying that about 10 people from the company’s marketing team have been let go. However, he added that it isn’t because the company is struggling. Rather, this is part of the company’s growth strategy for 2016.

“We’ve been working on automating many marketing processes over the past few months, so that the manual marketing campaigns no longer provided satisfactory return on investment,” he tells Tech in Asia.

Activities that were made redundant include local partnerships and offline campaigns.

Tomas explains that the startup has gathered its customer acquisition resources to its head office in Bangkok. Activities that were made redundant include local partnerships and offline campaigns, which had the lowest return on investment out of all the marketing channels used by the company.

HotelQuickly was in the news as recently as last week. It absorbed semi-rival app Tonight in Japan, effectively entering that country.

At the time, Tomas told Tech in Asia the startup had grown four times in terms of revenue and bookings during 2015, although he didn’t disclose any numbers. It has more than 2 million downloads of its apps so far, and is adding 50,000 new user accounts every month.

Tomas says HotelQuickly is currently busy raising its series B round, and is in “a cash comfortable position.”

“Just like any iteration from product to customer acquisition, we progress and evolve quickly. This is simply another stage of our growth, nothing else,” he explained.