Founder
Curtis Crimmins
Founder & CEO, Roomza
A hotel operator first, then a founder. The thesis behind Roomza came from running real hotels: a property is not one product, it’s hundreds of subtly different ones sold at the same price, photographed identically, and brokered by platforms that treat them as fungible. Hotels are selling the wrong thing. Roomza is what I built to fix it.
Developed
$100M+
in hotels
Slept in
3,000+
hotel rooms
Operated
150,000
guests as Roomza
Certified GM
4 brands
Hilton, Marriott, IHG, Best Western
How I got here
My start in hotels was tagging along with my mom to her job cleaning rooms at a Motel 6. I came up on the housekeeping side, with the people who actually keep a hotel running. Years later I came back to the industry the long way around, earning General Manager certifications from Hilton, Marriott, Best Western, and IHG, and developing more than $100 million in hotels along the way. The thing nobody teaches you in those programs is the gap between what a hotel sells and what a guest actually gets. That gap is the entire business now.
Before Roomza I was Chief of Staff at OYO, the hospitality unicorn, helping scale the US business. That seat gave me the portfolio view: the same room-level mispricing I’d seen as a GM, except at thousands of properties at once. Once you can see it at that scale, you can’t unsee it.
I started Roomza in 2020. The original version was a hotel brand. Between 2022 and 2025 we built and operated three properties: Roomza New Orleans, Roomza New York, and Roomza Baltimore. Together they hosted 150,000 guests under our own roofs. Most mornings, the conversation at the front desk was the same one: the room the guest booked wasn’t the room the guest wanted. We watched it happen for three years and got obsessed with why.
In 2025 we closed the operated hotels and rebuilt Roomza as what the operating years told us we needed: a data and AI platform that makes the room-level difference legible. To travelers. To the AI agents that increasingly book on their behalf. To robotics teams that need real interior data at scale.
What I’m working on
- Roomza
Room-level data and AI for travelers. Powers consumer discovery and a voice Concierge that knows which room is actually quiet, where the best views are, and how to get them.
- Roomza for Hotels
B2B intelligence and guest-advocacy layer for properties. Arrival Briefs, AI-shaped concierge briefs, and the room-level data hotels need to be legible to AI assistants.
- Roomza Data Network
A commercially licensable real-capture indoor corpus for robotics and spatial-AI teams, focused on hospitality interiors.
- Peristyle Partners
Management consulting for hospitality, retail, and consumer businesses. Separately, I advise frontier AI labs working on hospitality, as well as robotics and AI startups in NYC, Seattle, and the Bay Area.
In the press
Travel + Leisure · 2026
This Is the No. 1 Phrase You Should Say to Get a Free Room Upgrade, According to Hotel Staff and Frequent Travelers
CNBC · 2026
From Hyatt to Holiday Inn, America's free hotel breakfast is facing a K-shaped economic threat
The Boston Globe · 2026
Travel and tourism brands are in uncomfortable territory: The political fray
The Washington Post · 2024
Are bedspreads actually filthy? Hotel employees debunk 10 old myths.
Hospitality Net · 2023
An Interview with Curtis Crimmins
Hospitality Daily · 2023
Rethink Everything: We Can Do Better in Hospitality
HOTELS Magazine · 2022
The next hottest market? The Metaverse
BLLA
An Interview with Curtis Crimmins
HerTelier
Ally of the Month: Curtis Crimmins, Founder and CEO of Roomza
Plus other features, interviews, and podcasts, among others.
What I’m thinking about
The shift from search to AI-brokered hotel discovery. How hotels can become legible to LLMs without paying a vendor five figures a month for the privilege. Data licensing as the new distribution layer. The strange operational economics of running both a building and a software product, and what each one taught me about the other. Also: which hotel chains will be brands in ten years, which will be ghosts, and what the robots in hotel hallways are actually going to do at 2 a.m.
Off the clock
I split time between Seattle and New York with my husband Michael, married over ten years. The household also includes Katie (husky), Shako (Maltese), and a cat named Priscilla who runs the place. Most weekends involve a new room somewhere, a long walk, and a notebook full of things I should have noticed sooner.
Get in touch