The idea for TubStays wasn’t born in a boardroom, but in a hotel room after a long day’s hike. After a long trek in England’s Lake District, my wife and I checked into a hotel with a private in-room hot tub. Honestly, I just wanted to crash into bed. But the moment our tired legs sank into the warm water, it was pure bliss.
That soak ended up becoming the highlight of our trip, something we still talk about today.
Years later, we were planning our 2022 anniversary trip to Yosemite, and my wife suggested, "Let's find a place with a private tub." I was all in.
I got online, assuming it would be as easy as selecting a filter, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The major travel websites lacked a "private tub" option; listings were vague, photos were outdated, and community tubs were often incorrectly marked as "private."
Frustrated, I ended up calling hotels directly, asking them to send pictures of the rooms and tubs. We finally found the perfect spot and saved our anniversary trip.
I realized that for the giant travel sites, travelers like us were too small a niche to matter. The travel industry saw a private hot tub as a minor amenity that few people cared about, but for many of us, it was the entire point of the trip.
Realizing that others might face the same struggle, I started maintaining a spreadsheet of private hot tubs I came across.
In 2023, that spreadsheet went viral on Reddit, and our "eureka" moment arrived. The niche wasn't so small after all.
In early 2024, nearly four years since that first soak and still with no solution from the big travel sites, I decided it was time to build TubStays. Born from a personal passion and validated by the community, TubStays is unlocking a new way to travel, one tub at a time.
Our mission is simple: to build the most authentic platform for discovering curated listings of hotel rooms with private hot tubs.