If you’ve tried booking a vacation rental recently, you’ve probably hit this wall.
You find a place that looks reasonably priced. The nightly rate checks out. You’re ready to book.
Then you get to checkout… and the total is suddenly 15–20% higher than you expected.
That gap does more than annoy people. It changes how they behave.
Travelers hesitate. They abandon bookings. Or they do what more and more people now do—use Airbnb or Vrbo to browse, then hunt for a way to book the same property directly to avoid the fees.
For investors, that behavior shift is a signal.
When customers start actively working around a platform, it’s often a sign the business model is getting stretched… creating room for smaller players to step in and take market share.
That’s exactly the setup we’re seeing with a new company called Savvy.
Why this opportunity exists
Rising fees aren’t an accident; they’re structural.
Large, publicly traded marketplaces live under constant pressure to grow revenue, even as their core markets mature. When it becomes harder to add new users, companies start squeezing more revenue out of the users they already have.
That’s how you end up with layered service fees, checkout add-ons, and increasingly opaque pricing.
For investors, this matters for one reason:
Late-stage monetization almost always creates pricing distortions before it creates mass customer churn.
Savvy isn’t betting that people suddenly stop using Airbnb or Vrbo. It’s betting that travelers become more price-sensitive once they realize they’re paying hundreds (or even thousands) more for the exact same stay.
The overlooked half of the problem: suppliers
This isn’t just a consumer story. Professional hosts and property managers feel the squeeze, too.
On most large platforms, the marketplace owns the customer relationship, sets the rules, and controls when cash actually shows up. For operators managing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of properties, that loss of control affects cash flow, margins, and long-term brand value.
From an investor’s perspective, this matters because dissatisfaction exists on both sides of the marketplace.
Savvy is stepping directly into that gap.
Where Savvy changes the economics
Savvy’s approach is intentionally narrow.
It’s a book-direct vacation rental marketplace designed to strip out the typical 15–20% traveler service fees layered on by large platforms.
For travelers, the appeal is obvious: lower total cost, fewer surprises, clearer pricing.
For suppliers, it’s about re-establishing a more direct relationship with guests—without having to rebuild distribution from scratch.
And critically, Savvy doesn’t need to “win” the category to work. In a market this large, even a small share of bookings can support a very real business.
Trust and quality as an investment lever
One reason fee-based disruption often fails in travel is the lack of trust.
Saving money alone isn’t enough if the experience is negative.
Savvy addresses that by limiting supply to professionally managed properties only—no casual hosts or side hustle listings. The idea is to reduce the most common points of failure: poor communication, access issues, and last-minute chaos.
From an investor standpoint, this matters because marketplace economics are driven by repeat usage rather than one-time savings.
Lower anxiety leads to higher repeat rates, stronger word of mouth, and more durable demand over time.
How Savvy makes money (and why the model scales)
Savvy doesn’t charge travelers booking fees.
Instead, it monetizes in a familiar way: paid visibility.
Property managers can list for free, then opt into a flat monthly subscription for featured or sponsored placement in search results—similar to how paid positioning works across other digital marketplaces.
It’s also important to note Savvy’s order of operations.
Instead of buying demand early, the company focused first on building supply through professional property managers. Only after reaching meaningful inventory did it begin shifting attention toward awareness.
The early signals are encouraging.
Savvy has already onboarded roughly 150,000 properties across nearly 3,000 professional property management companies in North America. Traffic has grown at about 20% month over month, while gross booking value has averaged roughly 50% month-over-month growth—all before the company has leaned heavily into paid marketing.
Just as important, suppliers continue to come onto the platform without being asked to pay upfront—an early sign that the value proposition resonates on both sides of the marketplace.
If demand continues to scale, this model has a few attractive traits:
- High gross margins
- Predictable recurring revenue
- Monetization that doesn’t undermine the consumer value proposition
Why incumbents can’t easily copy this
In theory, the big platforms could lower fees.
In practice, doing so would immediately hit revenue and margins, something public markets often punish.
That creates a real imbalance.
Startups like Savvy can lead with pricing transparency because they aren’t defending an entrenched model. Incumbents, on the other hand, are constrained by the economics they’ve already built.
Where investor returns could come from
There are a few credible paths to value creation here:
- Strategic acquisition: As pricing pressure builds, incumbents may prefer buying a working alternative over re-engineering their own models.
- Marketplace cash flow at scale: Even modest conversion of free listings to paid placement can generate meaningful recurring revenue in a market this large.
- Optionality over time: Once a trusted book-direct marketplace exists, adjacent categories, like longer-term stays, hotels, or other travel verticals, become accessible.
None of these outcomes requires Savvy to dominate the industry. They just require disciplined execution within a well-defined market segment.
Proven leadership matters in private markets
In early-stage private investments, the idea matters… but the operator matters more.
Savvy is led by Eric Goldreyer, a founder with more than three decades of experience in hospitality and travel marketplaces.
Goldreyer founded BedandBreakfast.com in the 1990s and later sold it for an eight-figure exit. He went on to co-found TurnKey Vacation Rentals, which grew into one of the largest professional vacation rental management companies in North America before being acquired in a nine-figure transaction.
What’s important here isn’t just the exits; it’s the pattern behind them.
Eric has built, scaled, and exited businesses inside the same ecosystem Savvy now operates in. He understands the supply side, distribution challenges, and—critically—how larger incumbents think about acquisition.
For investors, that changes the risk profile.
This isn’t a first-time founder experimenting with a clever idea. It’s a repeat operator coming off the sidelines to pursue a narrow opportunity that the incumbents are structurally unable to address without buying it.
That kind of leadership doesn’t eliminate risk, but it meaningfully improves the odds that early traction turns into a real outcome.
Why this setup is interesting now
For investors, Savvy isn’t a bet on a travel app.
It’s a bet on a familiar pattern: late-stage platform monetization leads to consumer pushback, which creates openings for focused alternatives that reallocate value more efficiently.
Layer in a founder with multiple prior exits in the same ecosystem, a live product, and early demand signals—and you get the kind of setup private investors tend to look for.
Editor’s note:
After digging into the numbers, Frank personally invested $100,000 in Savvy. And Curzio One members have been joining him.
Watch Frank’s recent interview with Eric… and learn how to get in on this private placement.
