Lighthouse, a tech platform meant to help hotels drive revenue, has made its first acquisition since raising $370 million last year.
The company acquired The Hotels Network, a Barcelona-based tech company focused on marketing and distribution for hotels. The deal means a new offering is coming to the Lighthouse platform.
The Hotels Network has more than 20,000 hotels in its client portfolio, including brands Minor Hotels, One&Only Resorts, H World International and Preferred Hotels & Resorts. All 140 employees and founders are joining Lighthouse, growing the company to more than 850 employees.
“This is the biggest acquisition we have made, both in terms of the size of the business as well as the team,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lighthouse.
The price of the deal was not disclosed. Founders and employees owned 50% of The Hotels Network, and investors owned the other half, according to Juanjo Rodriguez, founder and CEO of The Hotels Network. The company has raised about $15 million since it was founded in 2015.
Lighthouse was among multiple business-to-business travel companies that collectively raised billions of dollars last year in part to fund acquisitions and generate growth. Fitzpatrick said last year that Lighthouse’s M&A strategy would be focused on strengthening its tech — acquiring companies that “solve a very particular problem.”
For this deal, he said the company completed an exhaustive search. The Hotels Network, which had been a partner for several years, and Lighthouse shared a number of clients.
“We knew the problem we were trying to solve for, and then it was about finding the right team and technology that was solving it in the most intuitive way,” Fitzpatrick said.
What the Deal Means for Lighthouse and Clients
The tech by London-based Lighthouse is meant to help hoteliers make decisions about pricing, promotion, and distribution. The tech uses AI to regularly scan market data and make recommendations accordingly. The company has 70,000 hotels in its portfolio.
The tech by The Hotels Network aims to deliver personalized offers and marketing messages to consumers as they’re shopping for hotels, with the goal of increasing direct bookings. That means the content shown on a hotel’s website could be different depending on the consumer and what their goals are, Rodriguez said. The company says its tech helps hotels increase direct bookings by an average of 32%.
“In order to present the right message in front of a potential guest, you need to know what is the right thing to say, and then the ability to actually present it at the right moment for them,” Rodriguez said. “From the hotel point of view, it means that you can create one, 10, 100 marketing strategies and launch all of them at the same time because every user will see only the best one for them.”
This marketing tech is different than companies that are more focused on bringing consumers to the website in the first place. Once the consumers are there, The Hotels Network takes over, Rodriguez said.
Combining the two technologies means that hotels should be able to personalize pricing and then make offers in a more targeted way, all from one platform. Now, the companies will spend the next months working to fully integrate the tech, officials said.
“Hoteliers have had to integrate too many systems for too long, and so by bringing the key elements of the commercial stack together, it’s taking all of that complexity away,” Fitzpatrick said.
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June 4, 2025 – NEW YORK CITY