Sequoia Capital-Backed Safara Curates New Gen Z Travel Booking

25.08.2023 - 14:08 / skift.com / Sherry Sun

Hotel booking startup, Safara, is hoping to use curated lists and invite-only memberships to meet the high expectations of millennials and Gen Z travelers. 

“Our view is that over the next 10 years, there’s going to be a generational shift in spending, and that’s just the natural course of population aging,” said Doug Schuessler, CEO of Safara. “We’re thinking about building a generational company … if we’re thinking about the long haul, the underlying trend of millennials and Gen Z are going to own more and more of the travel spending pie.”

Safara is a Los Angeles-based hotel booking startup. Co-founders Doug Schuessler and Cody Rose lead a team of product managers, engineers and designers to curate short lists of hotels recommended through community feedback and Internet research. The platform currently offers 10 percent back from every booking in the form of loyalty credits that can be used for future travel. What’s more, every booking is carbon neutral.  Safara did not disclose its financials to Skift, not uncommon for early-stage companies.

As of 2021, Gen Z makes up 40 percent of the U.S. consumer market. According to a 2022 report from YouGov, travel products and services rank third in Gen Z’s top spending categories, which is ahead of all other age groups on potential travel spending. Gen Zers are more likely to be influenced by environmental impact in their outlooks and decisions, having grown up in a time of heightened awareness for global warming and climate change. 

“Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Those are really big opportunities. That’s like our “Why Now”. That’s the opportunity I see,” said Schuessler. 

Safara was initially founded at the start of 2020 by Maya Poulton and Joey Kotkins, which offered a new type of online travel agency (OTA) through a subscription membership and a loyalty points system. Schuessler and Rose, who previously worked together at Square, Resy and American Express, bought the company from Poulton and Kotkins in 2021 and rebranded to carry the renewed travel booking experience legacy forward. 

“We viewed subscription as something interesting that we may want to do in the future, but we want to make it more accessible to more people,” Schuessler said. “So we don’t charge a subscription upfront. It’s free to sign up. We might introduce a subscription down the road for add-on type functionality, but we don’t have that today.

Schuessler and Rose met as co-workers at Square approximately eight years ago. The two became good friends and the idea of revamping travel booking and technology surfaced early on as they started to travel together. 

“We were like a couple of kids kind of early in our career, and it was more like a fun conversation than serious. But the serious part was