TripIt Owner Concur Backs Personalized Travel Search Engine Room 77

Travel and expense management company Concur revealed in its earnings today that it made an undisclosed investment in Room 77, a comprehensive and personalized search engine and review site focused exclusively on finding and booking hotel rooms.

Room 77, which officially launched in public beta in February, has collected and indexed data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties and also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers. The site provides travelers with specific details about each hotel room at a property, including the room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 also generates a virtual Room View, simulating the actual view from that room’s window using Google Earth-enabled technology.

The company also recently added the ability to book rooms on the site. Room 77 will reveals prices directly in search results, from Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotels.com, Cheaptickets and others. You can compare pricing for multiple room categories in grid view, which allows you to see what the next category room includes and for how much more that will cost you.

The startup was founded by Brad Gerstner (who is also founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, former CEO of National Leisure Group and a current Orbitz board member), and has raised $13.5 million from General Catalyst Expedia and Zillow founder Rich Barton, Erik Blachford (Former President and CEO of IAC Travel); Hugh Crean (Former President and CEO of Farecast; GM of Bing Travel); Bob Pittman (Founder of MTV); PAR Capital Management; Sutter Hill Ventures; and Felicis Ventures.

This isn’t the first investment for Concur in a travel-related startup. Concur put $5 million in flight price tracker Yapta and invested $40 million in online travel site Cleartrip. Concur also acquired TripIt, and GlobalExpense in 2011.