NovaBid in the press

The story behind the story

NovaBid's founder Thomas Mellot trained as a chef in Grenoble before moving to Scotland at 17, and has spent his working life on hospitality floors, the Caledonian and the Balmoral in Edinburgh, a world-ranked bar in Amsterdam, five-star Alpine hotel bars, and Edinburgh venues since. The Herald's piece opens with where the idea really started, though: a small family hotel in Normandy.

“It comes from two places. The personal one is that 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.”

The practical side is one every business traveller knows: booking a hotel in a city you don't know is an hour lost to tabs, second-guessed neighbourhoods and reviews you can't really judge, and you usually pay more than you planned.

“It 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? That is NovaBid. You post the trip once, verified hotels compete for it, and you choose.”

The article sets the model against a hard backdrop for Scottish hospitality: independent hotels routinely hand a double-digit commission on every booking to online travel agents while absorbing rising energy, staffing and supply costs. NovaBid charges hotels 12%, 10% for founding partners, locked for life, and nothing at all to the traveller.

“It's a reverse marketplace. Instead of a business traveller scrolling listings and paying whatever rate they're shown, they post their trip once, city, dates, budget, and verified hotels come back to them with their own competing offers. The traveller picks the one they want. Here, hotels compete privately for a specific, real piece of business, so the traveller gets a keener rate and the hotel keeps far more of it.”

Why Edinburgh first? Home advantage, and a market built for it: hundreds of independently run places to stay and a steady stream of small businesses booking staff into them, both sides of the marketplace already in one city.

“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. I want NovaBid to be a local business that puts something back into that, keeping more of every booking with the independent hotels here, rather than sending it to a company based abroad.”

And, as the piece notes, the platform is self-funded and honest about its stage:

“We're right at the start line, and I'm happy to be plain about that. The platform is built and live, and the whole loop works end to end. You post a trip, hotels come back with competing offers, you book and pay, and the hotel gets paid. What I'm doing is signing up the first cohort of Edinburgh independent hotels and opening up to the first business travellers.”