While the rest of the travel industry has been transformed by online booking platforms, one segment has barely changed: group bookings that arrive by email.
A corporate event coordinator requesting room blocks for 200 attendees. A cruise line inquiry for a conference group. An airline negotiating block seats for a tour operator. These requests land as unstructured emails, get routed to a staff member who manually interprets the details, checks availability, applies negotiated rates, builds a custom response, and waits for a reply that may or may not convert. The process takes hours or days. The error rate is high. And group bookings, despite this friction, generate higher revenue per booking than individual reservations.
Zurich-based Lobby was founded in 2025 to fix exactly this problem. The company has raised $2.2 million from Founderful, with Pascal Mathis - co-founder of Founderful and of GetYourGuide - joining the board as part of the investment.
What Lobby Actually Does
Lobby's platform automates the full lifecycle of email-based group booking requests. It parses intent across more than 100 languages, checks availability, generates quotes, and converts accepted proposals directly into reservations in the property management system. The company claims the entire process takes roughly 30 seconds. Response times drop 75% and conversion rates improve by up to 15%. New integrations average four days to complete, with two-day onboarding. Clients can choose full automation or a staff-review model where the AI drafts and humans approve.
The platform integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and major PMS tools, and is built by a team with direct industry experience. CEO Romy Abbrederis grew up working in her family's four-star hotel in Liechtenstein before building software for gaming and banking companies - a combination that shaped a product grounded in how hospitality operations actually work rather than how technologists imagine they do.
Where the $2.2 Million Goes
The funding enables Lobby to expand beyond hotels into adjacent segments: MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions), experiences and attractions, cruises, and airlines. Each of these verticals shares the same core problem - high-value B2B bookings that arrive via email and require manual processing at scale.
Mathis framed the investment thesis around execution depth rather than surface-level automation. What stood out, he said, was Lobby's ability to move beyond simple automation and actually execute workflows across systems - the difference between an AI that drafts a response and an AI that completes the booking.
For the travel industry and the broader hospitality sector, Lobby represents a category of AI application that does not make headlines but delivers measurable operational ROI: workflow automation for processes that have resisted digitization not because the technology was unavailable but because the complexity made it impractical. That gap is closing fast.
