USA, New York City, New York. May 05, 2025

Safara, a hotel booking platform that curates the world's best hotels and rewards travelers with cashback on every booking, announced its acquisition of Skipper, a software company empowering independent hotels with seamless shopping and checkout experiences. Alongside the acquisition, Safara also raised additional funding from defy.vc, Sequoia Capital, Thayer Ventures, and H20 to further accelerate its growth and innovation, bringing the company's total funding to-date to $14M.

Safara was founded by former Resy executives Doug Schuessler and Cody Rose who helped lead the company to an acquisition by American Express in 2019. Safara currently has 1M+ bookable properties globally in the marketplace app in addition to key boutique hotel groups like Ace Hotels, Aparium Hotel Group, Bridgeton, and Kirkwood Collection leveraging their online reservations SaaS solution.

Similar to Resy, Safara blends data aggregation and community-sourced recommendations to provide users with a curated booking experience. However, Safara also pairs this with a rich loyalty program that starts at 2.5% cashback and scales all the way up to 10% cashback to use towards your next trip. The strategy is attracting higher-spending users who travel frequently and are highly retentive: new users spend ~$1,000 per booking and 65% staying in hotels> 4x per year.

"By combining Safara's best-in-class marketplace product with Skipper's powerful direct booking technology, we're creating a platform that's never existed before," said Doug Schuessler, CEO and Co-Founder of Safara. "This union allows us to offer unparalleled value to both independent hotels and travelers, unlocking new ways for hotels to grow and for guests to benefit from a better digital experience."

The integration of Skipper's technology will enable Safara to deliver a uniquely differentiated platform already driving $100M+ in annualized gross merchandising volume. Skipper founders Jason Shames and Dane Bratz will be joining Safara to continue their mission of empowering independent hotels. "We built Skipper to help independent hotels thrive in an increasingly competitive market," said Jason Shames, CEO of Skipper. "Joining Safara allows us to combine our strengths and create groundbreaking tools for the hospitality industry."

Investors agree. "Safara's consumer technology paired with Skipper's hotel software is a highly-differentiated combination that's just scratching the surface of what's possible," said Brian Rothenberg, Partner at defy.vc. "We're excited to support their mission to empower independent hotels and to work with the team to deliver the innovation that this space deserves."

About Skipper: Skipper provides software to power the shopping & checkout experience on hotels' websites. Existing Skipper hotel customers include top boutiques, like Ace Hotels, Aparium, Inness, Troutbeck, Marram, The Ameswell, Dawn Ranch, Kirkwood Collection, and more. Skipper was founded by Jason Shames, Dane Bratz, and Cole Maritz.