Brand story
That line carries our admiration for Airbnb as much as our ambition — and just as much, our curiosity about how far this team can actually go.
The world is actually built
by its suppliers
One belief sits at the center of this company, and of how I see the world: the suppliers who actually build and run things are what matter.
When the internet arrived, everyone turned to platforms. Models that removed friction from transactions, models that reinvented the middleman — those got the attention, and most consumer software companies went to work on the middleman. Mobile was the peak of it.
We started as a platform too
We began in the platform business. What we learned there was that the middleman’s role is a mature market — at this point it is mostly a contest of capital.
Travel is especially unforgiving. Retention is structurally low because there is a minimum interval between trips. So acquisition costs run high while lifetime value stays low, which is the nature of brokerage. We concluded that consumer travel was the wrong fight for us.
The biggest companies
hold on to their suppliers
That is where the insight came from. Think about the largest companies in travel — Booking.com and Airbnb, without question. Both of them bind their suppliers tightly.
So when we say we want to beat Airbnb, part of what we mean is that we respect what they pulled off on the supply side.
Meanwhile consumers get everything, all the way down to polished LLM products. The suppliers who make up most of the industry are left far behind.
The whole team moved to Jeju
One of the most important decisions this team ever made was this: in 2022, all of us moved to Jeju to live alongside the people who run stays, and to build for the problems we saw up close.
Vacatio Solution — Shopify for hosts
So we build the PMS and channel manager that hospitality suppliers actually run their business on. Vacatio Solution — then called FineHost — is our product. Shopify, but for the people who run stays.
See Vacatio Solution
The problem wasn’t on the screen.
It was inside the room
Build operating software long enough and you hit a problem software cannot reach. The booking is tidy on screen — but that does nothing about a room being cold when the guest walks in.
Lights stay on for hours in a room nobody is in. Housekeeping stops by the front desk for a key, every single time. Most of the cost and effort in this business piles up in places nobody is looking at.
So we went into the room. Heating and cooling come up to meet the check-in time, a welcome light turns on at first entry, and after checkout the room powers itself down with nobody pressing anything. Housekeeping enters on their own code and finds the lights already on.
See the smart room
The distance still left
between the desk and the room
Once the rooms started running themselves, the lobby and the corridor were what remained. The booking was done in the app, yet arriving still meant standing in line — and one towel still took two trips by a person.
The kiosk took the lobby. Finding the booking, verifying ID, paying, issuing the key: all in one place, in several languages, so international guests aren’t queueing either.
Robots took the corridor. We don’t build the robots. We connect them — to the elevator, to the locks, to the operating system — so that a request reaches the door without passing through anyone’s hands. That has always been the work: joining up the things that were scattered.
See our roboticsIn the end,
we became the supplier
In 2022 we moved to Jeju to live beside the people who run stays. Now, in Samseong in Seoul, we run a hotel ourselves.
It is not a showroom. A new product meets real guests here before it ever reaches a partner’s property. Problems that a controlled demo will never surface come out here, those problems change the product, and the changed product runs here again.
If we are going to say we innovate for suppliers, we thought we should carry the weight of being one first. The call at 3am is ours. So is the lobby on the day check-ins back up. That is the only way to know whether what we built is real.
See VACATIO Hotel
We believe that innovating for suppliers is how the world actually changes.
We want the people who run stays — and the suppliers who hold up the rest of the world with them — to take hold of new technology and change things at the root. Mix that with our own curiosity about how far this team can go, and you get a team that simply refuses to die.
Hyunjun Ji · CEO, VACATIO