Two people who spent the better part of two decades inside the hotel industry, building the luxury travel agency they always wished existed.

Ryan was born in Kansas and moved to Seoul at three. International phone calls home cost several dollars a minute, and boxes of Cheerios were smuggled out the back door of the Air Force base and sold to desperate expats with children for fifteen dollars a box. Then Singapore, Jakarta, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles for college, a semester in Hong Kong. A summer working on an Alaskan fishing boat. It was not a conventional upbringing, and it produced, among other things, a person who pays an unreasonable amount of attention to whatever room he happens to be sleeping in.

He worked a hotel front desk in downtown Los Angeles through college, often the only employee on shift, wearing every hat the building had and fielding the kinds of guest requests that explained, in vivid and unforgettable terms, exactly why the job description always includes “other duties as assigned.” He had promised his parents he would build them a hotel one day. This is not quite that, but it is probably as close as he gets. After graduating he joined Wynn Resorts’ management training program, rotated through every department of one of the largest luxury hotels in the world, and landed on the pricing and distribution team, setting rates for five thousand rooms a night and learning exactly which guests receive preferential treatment and which ones don’t (spoiler: it was not the Expedia bookers).

Years on the corporate teams of Expedia and TripAdvisor followed, which gave him a clear and occasionally sobering view of how the online travel machine actually works. And somewhere in there is a story about Forbes and AAA sending secret inspectors to rate hotels, inspectors whose door locks were electronically tracked by the hotel so that staff could be positioned the moment they stepped into the hall to guarantee the coveted five-star, five-diamond rating. Ryan found this thrilling at twenty-two. He now finds it useful whenever a client asks how much weight to put on a five-star rating.

Renae spent part of her early childhood in Italy, grew up stateside, and built a first career in corporate finance. She was good at it but eventually decided she did not want it to be her life’s work. The diligence stayed (she is constitutionally incapable of an untracked detail), but seven years ago she founded a small luxury advisory where she still keeps a tight roster of clients. She has developed a precise feel for the difference between a hotel that reads well and one that delivers, and for making sure the right conversation with the property happens before you arrive rather than after something goes wrong.

We met in college at USC. Later moved from San Francisco to Park City after welcoming our first child to the world. Then Denver. Three months in Mexico during Covid. A year in Mallorca, and back to Mallorca again for the remainder of 2026. Between us we've lived in seven countries, stayed in more hotels than we can honestly count, and share a preoccupation with where you sleep that was a hobby — borderline condition — long before a profession.

Room Service is what we built when it became clear nobody else was doing hotels and lodging the way they wanted it done.