NovaBid · Our story
Built by hospitality, for independent hotels.
NovaBid is a reverse marketplace for business hotel stays, built in Edinburgh. You post a trip once, verified hotels compete with their best offers, and you choose. The traveller pays no fee; the hotel pays a small commission only when it wins the booking.
Where it comes from
NovaBid started long before me. My grandparents ran a small hotel in Normandy, and my father grew up in it. They lost it in the end. The big chains and the booking sites pulled their customers away, and independents like them had no way to compete. I grew up with that story, and it is the reason NovaBid exists: to give independent hotels the fair shot my grandparents never had.
The problem we kept hitting
There is a practical side too, and anyone who travels for work will recognise it. Booking a hotel in a city you don't know is a real time sink. You lose an hour clicking between tabs, second-guessing neighbourhoods and reviews you can't really judge, and you almost always end up paying more than you planned. It always struck me as backwards: why is the traveller the one chasing hotels and overpaying, when the hotels should be coming to the traveller with their best offer for the exact trip they need?
How it works
So we flipped it. You post your trip once, city, dates and budget, and verified hotels come back with their own competing offers. You pick the one you want. The hotel pays a commission of 10 to 12% only when it wins the booking. You pay nothing at all. Where Booking.com has the hotel list and the guest search, and the hotel hands over a commission it is contractually barred from publishing, plus payment fees on top, here the hotels compete privately for a specific, real piece of business. The traveller gets a keener rate, and the hotel keeps far more of it.
Why Edinburgh
Edinburgh is home. It is where I have worked front of house, and where I know the hotels and the market. It has more than two hundred independent hotels and a steady stream of small businesses booking staff into them, so both sides of the marketplace already exist here. There is a bigger reason too. Edinburgh's hospitality has long been world-class, but the last few years have been hard on it. Brexit and then Covid left the sector with rising costs, staff shortages and thinner margins. NovaBid is meant to put something back: keeping more of every booking with the independent hotels here, rather than sending it to a company based abroad.
Where we are, and where we are going
We are at the start line, and happy to be plain about it. The platform is built and live, and the whole loop works end to end. Right now we are signing up the first founding cohort of Edinburgh independent hotels and opening to the first business travellers. The hotels who join now lock in a 10% commission rate, below our standard 12%, for as long as they stay with us. The plan is to get it genuinely right in Edinburgh first, then grow across the rest of the UK as the founding hotels prove the model, and further out, into France.
Who is behind it
I'm Thomas Mellot. I trained as a chef in France, then spent my working life front of house in Edinburgh's hotels, Chef de Rang at the Balmoral's Palm Court and at Galvin Brothers in the Caledonian. NovaBid is the thing I wished existed every time I watched a hotel hand its margin to an OTA.
As featured in
The Herald
“Better prices for the consumer and improved margins for independent operators.”
Read the article →Be part of the founding cohort
Independent hotels and the businesses who book them. The first ones in shape what this becomes.