Technology company Jurny has reinvented hotel and short-term rental management with its vertically-integrated, AI-powered software. The company, founded in 2019, is already making waves in the industry, helping agents, managers and hosts scale up their operations in minutes by streamlining and automating every aspect of their work. The Real Deal spoke with CEO & Founder Luca Zambello, Sr. Director of Business Development Jason Lopez, and Board of Advisors member Kevin Rohani about the inspiration behind Jurny’s cutting-edge tech and how it’s already changing an industry that has historically moved at a glacial pace.
The Twin Problems Facing the Hospitality Industry
Zambello came up with the idea for Jurny’s platform while working in the hospitality industry. “I used to run a management company in the short-term rental space, where I managed about 300 units.” This caused him daily headaches and left him thinking about how to streamline his work to reduce the time and stress involved.
“I wanted to develop a system that could manage thousands or tens of thousands of units. And that is where my journey toward developing a software that could support that scale really began.”
He identified a pair of issues with the way that management companies and property owners worked. The first was fragmentation between solutions for the many management tasks, from booking to house cleaning to billing. “There are so many specialized solutions for each problem,” he explained, “and none of these solutions work well together or with the property management systems.”
The other problem was how the manual nature of this work prevented owners from scaling up their operations. Hosts have the choice of either spending the majority of their time trying to make these various platforms work together or handling everything manually, both of which distract them from expanding their portfolio. This was where Zambello saw the opportunity to leverage the growing field of Artificial Intelligence to bring the industry into the 21st Century.
Building a Solution from the Ground Up
Jurny distinguishes itself from competitors through a streamlined, modern approach to hospitality management. Instead of building yet another fragmented, multi-vendor marketplace for the industry, Zambello and his team focused on one best-in-class vendor per vertical, even developing some in-house solutions like access and IoT control. “We went as deep as possible with our direct connections in each category,” said Zambello. “We had this vertically integrated concept in mind before even thinking about AI, but it turned out that this is the best possible infrastructure you can create for AI.”
The resulting software is a one-stop shop for property management, integrating all of a host’s tasks on one platform while providing automated support every step of the way. Once integrated, Jurny enables hosts to automate up to 90% of their daily operations with the help of generative AI.
A recent Skift Research and McKinsey & Company study, “The Promise of Travel in the Age of AI,” emphasizes that the industry is “ripe for innovation.” Having seamless access to customer data and a properly built infrastructure for AI to utilize makes Jurny unique in the hospitality space. “The vertical integration component is unmatched,” industry veteran Rohani told us.
“No one else will take the time, energy, money and resources needed to do it in the hospitality software space.”
Working With Jurny to Scale Up
Integrating Jurny into a property manager’s operations involves an onboarding process where the operator fills out an FAQ covering many aspects of their properties. From there, the platform will take over, remembering each nuance of a given property, from where the microwave is to the cleaning schedule, and deploying this information flawlessly when required. On top of this, Jurny leverages AI to streamline the time-consuming task of guest communication.
In its current iteration, Jurny offers three levels of AI assistance. “We have a manual mode, we have a pre-populated mode, and we have a fully autonomous mode in beta,” said Zambello. Manual mode simply utilizes the platform’s vertical integration while leaving guest messaging to the host. The pre-populated mode provides recommended responses for each guest’s queries and the host can either send them as-is or make changes.
While still in beta, the fully autonomous mode will send out answers without needing any input from the host, further automating time-consuming management tasks. This mode is “almost there,” said Zambello. “It’s just a matter of having more data.”
A Whole New World of Hospitality Management
The results of implementing Jurny at the building level are striking. The platform increases building revenue by implementing features like dynamic pricing and guest screening, as well as reducing overhead with its AI-powered guest communications. “Buildings that utilize Jurny’s software to its fullest capacity can go from having a 30% gross operating profit (GOP) to a 70% GOP,” said Rohani, who explained that this fundamentally changes how these properties are looked at.
“This has a direct impact within month one on the market value of any building it’s in. You’re selling a completely different asset type.”
Over a portfolio of properties, the automation Jurny brings allows scalability at a level previously unimaginable. “If one person used to be able to manage eight properties, with Jurny, they can manage 80,” said Zambello. Importantly, Jurny scales with a growing business, allowing hosts to add exponentially to their portfolio without having to rip out their tech stack and put in all new systems.
The company’s AI constantly improves with every input and continuous feedback as it feeds in more data while also working on training customers on how to make the most of our powerful platform. “When you use Jurny right, you can improve your team’s efficiency by 80%,” he said, “so a big project for us next year is to really educate people on how to use the system properly.”
An Evolutionary Leap
The hospitality industry spends over $1 trillion annually on operational and software costs, and Jurny aims to make a sizable dent in that total. The company is experiencing rapid growth, with a 625% increase in users over the past three months and 40% growth in SaaS revenue over the same period. Jurny is currently seeking additional capital through a WeFunder campaign ending in early November, to further fuel its growth.
“I think everyone is excited about AI,” said Lopez. “Something like Jurny, with an embedded AI, streamlines portfolio management and allows people to personalize the guest experience at a level that really hasn’t been there before. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Early investors in Junry include major players like Vitalize Capital, Mucker Capital, SaaS Ventures, Singularity Capital, and Okapi VC, all of whom feel that the firm is poised to break through in a significant way. “Jurny is prepared to play a key role in the 4th industrial revolution and automation of the real estate industry,” says Angel Investor Draven Pike. “Once this massive trend catches on, there will be nothing that can stop it.”