Everything started with a road trip through Italy with my wife. 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 to our room opened, we were in for a great disappointment: the promised sea view was blocked by a tree. What an anticlimax! I will never forget the disappointment in the eyes of my wife 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 to 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 choosing our seat when travelling by plane, so why not choose our own room when staying in a hotel?

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 of the initial booking. Thanks to the detailed information, we assure guests that they can make the perfect room choice. As the guest is taken through an intuitive step-by-step process, they are presented with different upsell opportunities along the way.

A couple of days prior to arrival, the platform will extract the necessary booking information out the property management system in order to give the guest the opportunity to optimize their stay by room allocation. The guest selects the preferred room and, optionally, any additional services. After final confirmation, the data will be sent straight away back to the hotel.

During the process, all data is encrypted and no personal data will be saved unless permission was given. Our customers expect us to ensure that data is handled very carefully, both from a security and a privacy perspective. For this reason we have designed Expect Me from the ground up according to the latest industry best practices concerning security and privacy.

Our company was founded in November 2020 by 3 ambitious partners. The idea of Expect Me started with our founder and CEO Roeland Verhamme, who has several years of experience within hotels from international hotel chains. After a couple of years, he felt that it was time to move on and launched his first own 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 still alone. You need a strong team, you need to be able to brainstorm about certain challenges.

For the technical operation of our platform, we count on our co-founder and CTO Frank Smits. Frank is an IT architect with more than 7 years of experience in 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 their 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 the 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 company’s growth.