I’m Maciej — “Mark” to travelers abroad — a software engineer in Warsaw who got tired of overpaying for hotels.
My name is Maciej Wiszowaty, but since “Maciej” is nearly impossible to pronounce outside Poland, I go by Mark in conversations with international travelers, hotels, and readers.
I’m a software engineer based in Warsaw, Poland. I’ve spent the last several years building products in the aviation and SaaS recruitment industries — including systems that, from the inside, gave me a very direct view of how online travel booking really works. That perspective is what eventually led me to build hoo.travel.
In summer 2023, I was planning a family holiday to Mallorca. Two-year-old son, wife, both my parents. Five people, one trip, real budget constraints.
I spent weeks comparing hotels on the biggest booking platforms. Every option that met our standards — sandy beach nearby, good reviews for families, clean, decent food, pool — was just above what we could afford. I was ready to give up and settle for something worse.
Then I found Universal Hotel Castell Royal in Canyamel. Perfect location, sandy beach, Caves of Artà just around the corner, great reviews, exactly the kind of place we wanted. But the price on the big platforms? Still too much.
Out of curiosity, I went to Universal Hotels’ own website. There was a toggle: “show prices with our free membership program.” I clicked it — and the price dropped by 35%. The whole trip suddenly fit our budget. We had one of the best family holidays of our lives.
That trip changed how I plan travel. I started digging into how the industry actually works. It turns out hotels strongly prefer direct bookings — they save on commission fees that aggregators charge (typically 15–25% of the room rate, sometimes more). Many hotels pass a meaningful chunk of those savings back to guests through free membership toggles, direct-booking discounts, and exclusive rates you’ll never see on the big comparison sites.
Since then, every family trip I’ve organized, I’ve compared three prices: tour operator packages, aggregator sites, and direct hotel bookings.
“Every single time, direct booking has saved us 2,000–3,000 PLN (roughly €450–700) across the whole group. Sometimes more.”
The problem is that comparing hotel direct prices manually takes weeks. You have to visit each hotel’s site individually, find the right toggle or promo code, apply it, check dates and party composition. Existing hotel comparison tools didn’t help me solve this. Most aggregators pull prices from a small set of OTA partners rather than from hotels’ own booking engines. Others show direct rates only occasionally, or fail to return valid results for families with children, or miss smaller properties entirely. None of them let me compare direct-booking prices at scale, in one place.
So I built hoo.travel to do that comparison automatically. You search once, and we check the hotel’s own booking engine directly — with your dates, your party, your kids’ ages. Prices are refreshed at least daily (we cache up to 24 hours to keep the site fast, but the source is always the hotel itself, not a third-party feed). We show you the actual direct price, and then you book on the hotel’s own website.
hoo.travel is ad-funded, and we’ll add more ad partnerships over time — including possibly direct hotel ads someday. But like ads on Google Search or Google Maps, advertising on hoo.travel never changes hotel rankings, prices, or what appears in your search results. Ads sit alongside the tool — they don’t shape the tool.
We query each hotel’s own booking engine — not OTA aggregators, not cached third-party feeds. Prices are refreshed at least daily, and you’re always sent directly to the hotel’s own site to book.
hoo.travel doesn’t handle reservations. You click through to the hotel’s website, book directly with them, and get their loyalty perks, their cancellation terms, their customer support.
Right now we cover roughly 1,700 hotels across Mallorca, Menorca, and Ibiza. The Canary Islands are next, and after that: Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, the Spanish coast, Sicily. Deliberate order — I’d rather add each destination well than sprinkle coverage everywhere.
hoo.travel is a solo project. There is no marketing department, no VC-funded growth team, no travel agency behind this. Just me, in Warsaw, building the tool I wish I’d had in 2023.
Outside of code and travel research, I spend most of my time with my family. Somewhere between fixing production bugs and reading my son a story is where most of my week happens. When I travel, I’m the person who spends three hours planning the day so we hit the good bakery before the beach fills up.
I love the Mediterranean — obviously. The Balearics specifically, because the diversity across three neighboring islands is genuinely striking: Mallorca’s mountains and coves, Menorca’s untouched calm, Ibiza’s contrasts between party towns and quiet villages. I’ve walked pieces of all three.
The best way to reach me is email. I read everything myself — if you have a question about a hotel, a suggestion, feedback about the site, or you’re from a hotel wondering how you appear in our results, just write.
If you were wondering about the “Mark” I use in social media conversations and community forums — that’s still me. Same person, different name, chosen because a Spanish or American traveler shouldn’t have to struggle with Polish phonetics to ask a simple question.
Thanks for reading this far. If hoo.travel saves you money on your next trip, I’ve done my job right.
