Airy Rooms

» see airyrooms.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Most graves in this inventory died of something I had to go and read about afterward. This one died of a thing I was living through at the same time, from a different corner of it. In the spring of 2020 I was in Ankara doing computer vision work that carried on more or less unchanged over a home connection. Airy's entire business was the opposite kind of work. It only existed while people were physically somewhere they did not live.

The company was founded in Jakarta in 2015. Indonesian Wikipedia names Danny Handoko and Samsu Sempena as the founders, both of them out of Traveloka, and Airy spent its whole life described in the press as a Traveloka-affiliated venture rather than an independent one. Louis Alfonso Kodatie was chief executive by the end.

The idea was simple enough to explain in one sentence, which is usually a good sign for a consumer product. Indonesia had an enormous supply of small independent hotels and almost no way for a traveler to know what any of them would be like inside. Airy did not build hotels. It signed them up, held the rooms to a published standard and sold them under its own name.

By 2020 that covered about 2,000 properties and more than 30,000 rooms across roughly a hundred cities. Then March arrived and the number of people booking a budget room in another Indonesian city went to approximately zero, and stayed there.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually sold ~

The product was a promise about a room, not the room itself. An Airy booking came with seven guaranteed things: free wifi, a flat-screen television, hot water, air conditioning, clean bedding, bathroom amenities and bottled water. Nothing on that list is luxury. The point was that you would get all of it whether the building had a star rating or not, and there were three tiers, Airy Eco at the bottom and Airy Premier at the top.

For the hotel owner the deal was distribution and a brand in exchange for meeting a spec and giving up pricing control. For the traveler it was the removal of a specific kind of dread, the one where you have booked a cheap room in a city you do not know and cannot find out anything about it until you are standing in it. India had OYO doing the same thing and Indonesia also had RedDoorz. It was a crowded idea by the time it stopped.

~ the month the demand went to zero ~

The Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association counted more than 1,600 hotels temporarily closed as the pandemic took hold. An aggregator sits on top of that supply and takes a cut of bookings, which means it has no revenue at all when the bookings stop, and no assets to sell when it needs cash. Airy cut around seventy percent of its staff in April 2020 and lasted about a month after that.

The announcement came on 8 May and was unusually plain about the reason. The company said it could not keep going given the technical decline and the loss of people, and that it would stop serving partners after 31 May 2020. The competition took the other road. RedDoorz and OYO furloughed and cut pay and waited it out, which made Airy the first Indonesian hospitality startup to close for good rather than shrink.

~ who was left holding it ~

When an aggregator dies, the thing it aggregated does not. Two thousand small hotels woke up on 1 June 2020 with the wrong name on the signage and no listings anywhere, facing a tourism market that would not recover for another two years. Most of them had been ordinary local hotels five years earlier and went back to being ordinary local hotels, minus whatever they had spent on meeting the standard.

That is the honest shape of the loss here. The software was replaceable and the brand was five years old. What went with it was a piece of coordination that had made a fragmented, uninspectable market legible to strangers, and nobody in Indonesia rebuilt exactly that afterward.

One detail deserves credit. Six years on, airyrooms.com still answers, and what it serves is the goodbye notice. Terima kasih Indonesia, Airy mohon pamit. Five years of being your budget travel option was the best thing that could have happened to us, and today, with a heavy heart, Airy has to take its leave. Most companies in this inventory let the domain lapse into a parking page inside a year. This one paid the registrar to keep saying thank you.

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