Welcome to Tribii: a fairer deal for independent hotelss

If you run an independent hotel, you already know the feeling. A guest books a room, you're happy to have them, and then as much as 30% of that booking can disappear to an online travel agency before the money ever reaches you. You did the work. You'll change the sheets, greet the guest, recommend the good restaurant down the street. But a middleman you never really chose takes a slice of nearly every reservation, owns the relationship with your guest, and quietly decides how visible you are to the next one.

We think that's backwards. And that, more than anything, is why Tribii exists.

So before we get into roadmaps and features, we wanted to start this blog with a simple hello, and an honest explanation of who we are, where this came from, and what we're trying to change.

Who we are

Tribii is a software platform built to put independent hospitality back on equal footing. Not another OTA; not a marketplace that takes a quarter of your revenue and calls it a partnership. We build modern, genuinely easy-to-use tools that help small hotels, B&Bs and guesthouses win more direct bookings, cut their distribution costs, and run their day-to-day without needing an IT department or a five-figure software budget.

The name says a lot about the intent. Tribii comes from the idea of a tribe: a community of people travelling, hosting, and looking out for one another. Our logo carries a small tent, a nod to shelter and the road, and the three "i"s are stylised as a host welcoming two travellers through the door. The palette is green on purpose. This is about sustainability and keeping value in local communities, not extracting as much as possible and moving on.

Where the idea came from

Honestly, Tribii started with a small, slightly stubborn habit.

One of us would open Booking.com to find somewhere to stay, browse until something looked right, and then close the tab. Next step: straight to Google or Google Maps, find that same hotel, and book with them directly instead. Partly because it's better for the hotel (they keep the commission that would otherwise vanish), and partly because it's better as a guest. Book direct and you're talking to a real person, not a platform's policy engine. If your plans change and you want to leave a night early, a hotel can usually sort that out on the spot when your rate allows it, where an OTA reservation tends to be rigid and impersonal.

But trying to book that way, you keep hitting the same wall. Search a hotel on Google Maps and, more often than not, there's no real website to book on. Just a contact form, a link straight back to Booking.com, or a booking engine that looks a decade old, frequently with no way to actually pay online. The hotel clearly wants direct bookings; it simply doesn't have the tools to make them easy. So the guest gives up and books through the OTA anyway, and the cycle pays the middleman one more time.

Do that enough times and a bigger question starts nagging at you: if booking direct is better for almost everyone involved, why is it the harder, clunkier option? Why does the whole system quietly push both sides toward the middleman?

The more time we spent around independent hotels, the more obvious the answer became. Hoteliers and travellers are frustrated by exactly the same thing, and they almost never realise it. Hoteliers lose up to 30% to commissions and lose control of their own guest relationships. Travellers pay prices inflated by those same commissions, get funnelled toward whatever the platform decided to show them, and slowly lose access to the small, characterful, family-run places that made travelling worth it in the first place. Same middleman; same squeeze; two sides of one broken arrangement.

What struck us is that the problem was never demand. Across Europe there are roughly 170,000 independent hotels and hundreds of thousands more B&Bs and guesthouses, and people genuinely want to stay in them. What's missing is fair infrastructure: affordable, modern technology that lets these businesses compete on their own terms instead of renting visibility from a handful of giants.

The timing finally makes sense, too. Cloud infrastructure and AI mean a small, focused team can now build hospitality software that used to require enormous companies and budgets. Travellers are actively looking for authentic, local stays. And hoteliers are, frankly, fed up. Put those together and there's a real opening for something built around fairness rather than leverage. That's the gap we set out to fill.

What Tribii actually is, right now

We're a young company, and we'd rather be honest about where we are than oversell it.

Our starting point, and our core product, is a free booking engine and a direct-booking website for your hotel. You get a clean booking page you can share, plus a widget you can embed on your own site, so guests can book with you directly instead of through Booking.com or Expedia. Direct bookings made this way are commission-free. Payments go straight to you; we act purely as the technology in the middle, never as the one holding your money. You keep full control over your pricing, availability, changes and cancellations. No lock-in, no long contracts.

We lead with "free" on purpose. We know switching tools is a hassle and that the hospitality world has been burned before, so we'd rather earn trust by being useful from day one than by sending you an invoice on day one.

From there, the platform grows with you. A full Property Management System and channel manager, deeper analytics, AI-assisted revenue and SEO tools, and eventually a traveller-facing marketplace that connects conscious guests directly with independent stays: all of it is on the way. But the foundation stays the same at every step: more direct bookings, lower costs, and your guest relationship staying yours.

What we want to achieve

Our ambition isn't to become the next big intermediary. It's to make the intermediary matter less.

We want independent hotels to keep more of what they earn and to own their relationship with their guests again. We want travellers to find the real, local places and know their money is supporting the community they're visiting rather than a corporate booking fee. And we want to prove that you can build a profitable, lasting technology company in hospitality without squeezing the people who actually do the hosting.

It's a structural shift we're after, not a clever short-term tweak. The fair infrastructure layer for independent hospitality in Europe: that's the thing we're here to build, and we know it's a long road. We're genuinely glad to have you reading at the start of it.

Come and try it

The best way to understand Tribii is to use it, so you can try the demo for free and see exactly how the booking engine and your direct-booking page work, with no commitment required. If you have questions, want to talk through your specific setup, or just want to push back on something we've said, reach out through our contact form. We read every message, and at this stage you'll usually be talking to the people actually building the product.

Welcome to Tribii. Let's give independent hospitality a fairer deal.