Roomiy Finance CEO Khal Ladha Takes On the OTAs to Put Billions Back in Hotel Owners' Hands

A hotel owner can have a strong month of bookings and still face an uncomfortable conversation with their accountant, CFO or lender.

The property sold more rooms at higher rates, yet costs climbed faster: payment processing, loyalty fees, mandatory brand marketing, debt service. After owners pay to acquire those bookings and process payments, they may keep less than forecast, sometimes less than the mortgage requires.

Khalid "Khal" Ladha co-founded Roomiy Finance to close that widening gap between what a hotel earns and what its owner keeps.

Roomiy aims to be the first company to prove flat-fee pricing at scale in hotel distribution. Distribution is the first product, with plans for financial services expansion in the near future catering to their core customer: the hotel owner and franchisee owner operator.  With Roomiy, owners commit a portion of their inventory in exchange for contracted revenue, with 0% commissions and 0% credit card fees on all Roomiy bookings.

The company has grown more than 500% year over year, Ladha says. It raised venture capital last year from Slow Ventures (Robinhood, Venmo) and Better Tomorrow Ventures (AngelList, Ramp), two funds known for early bets on fintech companies that went on to rebuild their industries.

Few executives have seen hotel distribution from as many angles. Ladha started in hotel operations at Fairmont, helped drive revenue strategy for US ownership groups at Duetto, and led the global hotel supply function at Super.com. He’s also run a commodity and high-yield trading fund, experience that gives him a rare ability to connect finance and hospitality into one clear vision.

That trading and financing background shapes his thesis - hotels are not commodities. But they do have many commodity nights that need to be sold. Shoulder, slow season, long-lead base of business and so on. He sees room nights as an asset class. After our enjoyable discussion, I tend to agree with him.

Other asset classes, from oil to eggs, have futures and fixed income markets to hedge perishable inventory. Even the US egg market, worth over $30B annually, has those tools  Ladha notes. Hotel rooms are just as perishable, since an unsold room night expires worth nothing, yet hotels have zero comparable financial infrastructure.

The US hotel room night market is at least $200B, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA). He thinks we can built better, and founded Roomiy to address this opportunity. 

Ladha co-founded Roomiy with Duncan Hall. The two met at Cornell and worked together at Duetto before Hall helped lead the product organization at Navan. Together, they are building a model that gives owners more control over how revenue flows through their business.

Hotels increasingly rely on online travel agencies (OTAs) to reach guests, and they pay for that reach through commissions and payment processing fees. OTAs increasingly hold hotel working capital through their OTA Collect and merchant model, and payment processing costs have risen sharply over the past decade as virtual credit cards have spread.

The facts back this up: In 2025, Booking Holdings grew to $130B globally in OTA collect bookings. Each of those bookings was once upon a time the working capital of the hotel. Now, it belongs to the OTA’s who remit to the hotels weeks or months later in some cases. 

Its NOI-as-a-Service offering pairs a guaranteed annual commitment of room nights, often thousands of nights per hotel annually, with a flat fee in place of standard commissions and card fees. Those savings flow straight to net operating income (NOI), which has an outsized effect on real estate and asset value. Owners can compare Roomiy's terms, including its fee, with what they expect to keep through their existing channels.

Ladha welcomes that comparison. His view is simple: everyone else in distribution gets paid on gross revenue, while owners get paid on net. He wants to reshape distribution to reward the people who carry the risk.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The interview

Q: What did you learn from working on both sides of a hotel booking that led you to start Roomiy?

I kept coming back to the owner. Duncan and I have sold more than $4B of room nights combined over our careers, he at Navan and I at an OTA. We built great businesses, but they weren't designed to put the owner first. I grew up around hotel owners. They are my friends, my family and my community. Building fintech that puts them first felt like a huge opportunity to make a difference.

These are small business owners and entrepreneurs building their version of the American Dream. Owners carry the mortgage and fund PIP (property improvement plan) work. They also pay to acquire each booking and pay processing fees to get paid. Everyone else in the ecosystem calls themselves a partner, and they are, but almost all of them take a fee off the gross without taking real risk. We wanted to build around owner economics. If we create value for that core audience, the sky is the limit.

Before launching Roomiy, we interviewed hundreds of franchisees at events like AAHOACON, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association's annual convention. They kept raising the same issues: volatility, high OTA fees, and payment processing fees that grow every year. If we could help reduce those costs, it would make a meaningful difference to their businesses and their peace of mind. That was all the motivation we needed to move fast.

My financial background also drew me to the revenue itself. If we understood a hotel's booking patterns, could we make a financial commitment against part of that business? Could we build a fixed income market that gives the owner more certainty while reducing what they spend to sell those rooms?

Most folks don’t realize this, but on the median select-service hotel in America, $1 of incremental savings can be worth around $10 of asset value! Saving $1 has literally 10x more value to our customer than adding an incremental dollar of revenue. Especially when that revenue comes via pricey channels.

That is where Duncan and I saw our opportunity.

Q: Owners have relied on OTAs for years. Are you asking them to rethink a familiar way of doing business?

Owners rely on those channels because they bring customers. An owner has a property to run, and the team needs bookings. But distribution has always been something owners handed off to others. We think that's a mistake. These costs deserve real time and attention.

Owners should have more options. Hotel owners and franchisees hold tens of millions of dollars in real estate, but they aren't banked or serviced that way. They should be. That's why Roomiy is building the AI-enabled future of distribution and reporting. Owners log into their Roomiy account and access demand, liquidity and savings in a few taps. We help them sell on terms that actually work for them, including how much they keep and when they get paid.

We ask owners to compare our offer against their existing business. They know what those rooms tend to earn. We show them exactly how a Roomiy commitment would work for their property.

Q: A revenue manager reports an increase in average daily rate (ADR). The owner sees little improvement in earnings. How do you explain that disconnect?

Duncan and I come from revenue strategy. Those are our people. Historically, though, revenue management has focused on top-line growth, with less attention to credit card fees, cash conversion cycles and risk hedging. Those have been the domain of CFOs, finance teams, asset managers and ownership. Revenue management still has a huge role to play. Roomiy adds the ability to lock in fixed profit on rooms months in advance. You have to account for what it costs to generate demand and revenue.

A higher rate can be a good result. But if the hotel paid more to acquire the booking, the owner keeps less than the headline number suggests.

ADR and RevPAR help the team understand sales and revenue performance. The owner also needs to look at selling costs and their impact on net operating income. Kalibri Labs and others have done pioneering work here, and we build on it with technology and AI-powered underwriting, focused on bottom-line profit.

That is why we focus on the booking after costs. Reduce the expense of generating room revenue, and the hotel keeps more. Distribution platforms take no risk and take a cut every time. Software platforms give you data with no mechanism to act on it. Roomiy programmatically delivers the outcome owners want: more NOI.

Q: How would you explain Roomiy to a hotel owner in five minutes?

We help hotel owners lock in profit and lower distribution fees. More savings means higher asset value when it's time to sell or refinance.

We assess the hotel's business and agree on the inventory commitment and financial terms. You know the revenue committed and the payment schedule. Your team continues to price and sell the remaining rooms. You get paid in advance every month, in high season and low season alike.

Take a 200-room hotel running at 70% occupancy. With Roomiy, the revenue team relies less on OTA promotions and accelerators. It has fewer rooms left to sell and can yield the remainder even higher than forecast. The owner finally has a base of income and cash flow to plan around. Revenue, not more debt.

We call it fintech because we are building financial services and the infrastructure to make room nights an asset class that can be bought, sold, financed, factored and borrowed against. That takes time, partnership and vision. I speak with investors, lenders and owners, and each group asks different questions. For the owner, it comes down to three things: how much revenue we commit, when they receive it, and what they keep after our fee.

Q: How should owners weigh committing rooms in advance against holding out for a higher rate later?

Most of your rooms should go toward maximizing rate. Some should go toward locking in cash flow so the hotel can cover debt service, payroll, PIP financing and more. Even for a franchisee who simply wants cash flow, we see the ability to advance liquidity against future room production as the next big thing for our industry.

We spent years at Duetto. We understand the value of revenue management and the work involved in pricing a hotel. An owner should also be able to make a financial decision about how much revenue to commit. The right mix depends on the property, the terms, the debt service and the hotel's OTA usage. Replacing a portion of OTA merchant and OTA collect bookings makes a massive difference in a hotel's cash conversion cycle.

That certainty matters most heading into quieter periods. Owners know which months perform well and budget around those patterns, but they still have expenses to cover before bookings arrive. Our commitment gives them a set amount of revenue and a schedule for receiving it. That matters when planning capital work or approaching a refinancing. With Roomiy, hotels have consistent liquidity and demand year-round, no longer at the mercy of seasonality.

Q: How do you decide whether you can make that commitment?

We can't give away the secret sauce. We are inspired by companies like Shopify, Stripe and Toast that use financial and transaction data to make deterministic decisions about financing and revenue. In 2027, Roomiy plans to announce some major partnerships that reflect how we see the AI-first future of distribution.

With several years of data, we can see clear patterns in the revenue a hotel generates. We use that detail, along with other underwriting models and data points, to set pricing and the amount guaranteed.

Our initial focus is hotels with roughly 100 to 500 rooms in major North American markets, particularly properties with substantial OTA business. We work across Canada and the US, including California, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Oregon, and we continue to expand.

Q: Why do owners raise payment processing costs so often, even when they seem small next to labor or renovations?

They pay those costs across a huge volume of business and have felt powerless to slow them. Lowering them creates real operating leverage.

A charge on one booking looks manageable. Look at what you paid across the hotel over a year, and the picture changes. The owner covers those expenses from the same room revenue that runs the property. Reducing the cost of receiving a booking makes a difference without changing the guest experience.

Timing matters too. A guest can book well before the hotel receives the money, which affects the cash available to operate. OTA collect programs drain hotel cash flow. We are working to change that for our customers. It's a hard fight, because third parties make billions a year on working capital that should flow to owners.

Q: Why should owners think about selling costs and real estate value together?

The owner runs an operating business inside a real estate investment. Every decision about selling rooms affects the income that investment generates.

When a hotel reduces selling costs, those savings add to net operating income, and owners and investors value the property on that income. Owners call this cap rate math. The typical select-service hotel we serve trades at roughly a 10 cap, or a 10% capitalization rate. That means every $1 of durable savings we create can add up to $10 of asset value at sale or refinancing.

We look beyond the rate attached to a booking. A hotel can accept a different rate and keep more after costs. The numbers show whether the hotel did better.

We don't promise a particular valuation. We evaluate room revenue with the owner's investment in mind, which matters most to an owner approaching a refinancing.

Q: Hotel teams already manage a lot of systems. What experience do you want them to have with Roomiy?

We want them to spend little time managing it once it's set up. The whole point is that Roomiy just works. Guests arrive, cash arrives, hotels save money, and NOI grows. Simple.

I think of our product as capital and certainty, with technology supporting the commitments we make. Duncan and I have worked with hotel teams around the world, across every flag. We know what's on their plate. Roomiy fits into their operation and delivers the financial terms the owner agreed to.

Q: How do you and Duncan balance ambition with focus?

We are responsible fiduciaries, and we are here to go big and go fast. My finance background means I'm always seeing new possibilities around hotel revenue. Duncan keeps us focused on what we need to deliver now. We share a lot of context and approach problems differently, which is exactly what you need when building a company with broad ambition.

Q: You've talked about the next generation taking over family hotel portfolios. What opportunity do you see?

Someone who grew up around the family hotels may now be responsible for several properties. They understand what their family invested and the work it took to build the business. I'm a proud member of the Ismaili community, which owns over a thousand hotels across Canada and the US. I'm also a millennial, part of the generation taking charge as these transitions happen. We expect consumer-grade products everywhere. Roomiy is a business product built to feel like a consumer product for a new era of owner-operators.

This generation also has a chance to review relationships and agreements that may have been in place for years. They aren't bound to their parents' view. When agreements come up for renewal, they can decide whether the same terms still serve the property or whether another option would serve it better.

I want those owners to know Roomiy exists when they make those decisions. We are here to help.