SAOStay — Map every hotel you’ve stayed in and track the ones opening next

Hi everyone!

SAO is a luxury hotel journal and personal hotel map for travelers who want one place to save hotels they love, remember past stays, and discover properties worth planning around. We built this app for all the hotel lovers out there.

Being the packrat that I am, I collected everything from keychains and foreign coins to those souvenir travel spoons when I traveled growing up. As I got older, I started to value material “things” less and memories more.

I’ll always remember staying at a $2 hostel outside Hampi, India, where the advertised A/C broke down in the middle of the night. Or the time I saved up enough points to take my partner to the Park Hyatt Busan. Very different hotels, but both became part of how I remember those trips.

The hostels of my early twenties eventually gave way to destination ryokans and hotels that were experiences in themselves. I’ve realized that hotel memories, for those who care, can vividly define the travel experience.

Those memories often end up scattered across photos, booking emails, map pins, notes, and spreadsheets. SAO brings them together so travelers can rebuild years of stays, browse them on a map, and keep a record of the hotels that shaped their travels.

We’re focusing on luxury hotels because, for the travelers we’re building SAO for, the hotel is often part of the reason for the trip—not simply a place to sleep. The design, service, history, and setting can become some of the most memorable parts of traveling.

SAO is available on the iOS App Store, and we recently revamped the design to make the personal hotel map the focus of the experience. You can learn more at saostay.com.

And if you’re curious about new hotels in the development pipeline, we also built a hotel openings engine at saostay.com/hotel-openings.

We’re trying to make the app as beautiful as the memories it holds, so we’d appreciate anyone willing to help test it—and tell us what you like and dislike. Totally open to feedback, good and bad.

If it earns a place on your phone, an honest App Store review would mean a lot to us. For a fledgling app, every review makes a real difference.