Solving the lodging technology problem

Multiple short-term rental businesses, over a decade of experience

Co-founders Wes Smithe (CEO) and Chad O’Farrell (President) serendipitously met in Chicago through a mutual friend in early 2015. Prior to meeting, Wes co-founded a global marketplace for professional vacation rentals called Vaystays, a spinoff of a niche marketplace for college football weekend home rentals he helped launch with his previous partners in the late 2000’s called GamedayHousing.com.

While successfully leading hotel & resort business development efforts at Groupon Getaways, Chad witnessed first-hand the impact alternative lodging was making in the travel space, and he quickly decided to make the leap into the startup world joining Wes at Vaystays. 

A few years later, convinced by the recent advances in web technology, and the severe level of dissatisfaction among the professional operators supplying Vaystays, Wes and Chad decided to pivot to building a modern, enterprise-grade PMS with native channel connectivity, and Direct was born.

Football weekends got the team into the STR space, but exposure to professional suppliers unearthed the big realization: the industry needed a software update!