GriefStay is the world's first bereavement-aware hotel arbitrage platform. When a traveler passes away mid-booking, their unfinished hotel stay ā the warm room, the continental breakfast credit, the partially used minibar ā is auctioned in real time to verified grief tourists whose emotional profile most closely mirrors the deceased's TripAdvisor review sentiment. You don't just sleep in a room. You sleep in someone's unfinished story. Our LLM makes sure you're the right person to finish it.
12.4K
Stays Matched
94.7%
Sentiment Alignment
48h
Avg. Auction Close
šØ The Grand Harborview, Lisbon ā Room 412
Booking holder: Gerald P., 71. Ocean-view double. 3 nights remaining. Minibar untouched. Breakfast included. Gerald's final TripAdvisor review (Feb 2026): "The light through the curtains at 7am was the kind of thing you'd want to remember."
"Morning light in hotel rooms makes me cry in a way I have not fully explained to anyone." ā her most recent review
Prolific reviewer of oceanfront properties; described a Funchal sunrise as "a rebuke to everything I had previously valued."
Score below threshold. SentimentTraceā¢ recommends this bidder consider our Tangier inventory instead. The match is not right. Gerald deserves better.
ā± 6h 22m remaining
GriefConciergeā¢ notifying next-of-kin post-close
ā GriefStay auctions require verified bereavement credentials or documented existential curiosity. All stays subject to hotel re-letting confirmation. GriefStay is not a funeral home.
We combine large language model sentiment analysis, bereavement tourism theory, and the firm belief that an unfinished hotel stay is a form of unfinished feeling that should be completed by the right person.
GriefStay maintains real-time API integrations with 2,800 hotel partners across 64 countries. When a guest's booking is terminated due to death ā confirmed via next-of-kin notification, hospital discharge codes, or what our legal team carefully refers to as "contextual inference from property management system flags" ā the remaining nights, included services, and minibar inventory are logged into our StayInventoryā¢ system within 4 hours. The room is held. The curtains are left as the guest last positioned them.
Our core model was fine-tuned on 4.2 million TripAdvisor reviews left by travelers who have since passed, cross-referenced with the specific properties reviewed, the emotional register of the prose, and the degree to which the reviewer seemed to understand that they were describing something beyond a hotel. The model extracts a Grief Fingerprintā¢ ā a 47-dimensional sentiment embedding covering wistfulness index, solitude preference, light sensitivity, breakfast intentionality, and what our lead researcher calls "the degree to which a person reviews a hotel the way they would review their own life." The model scores each deceased traveler and each prospective grief tourist, then matches them on cosine similarity. A match score below 80% is rejected. Gerald deserves the right person in that room. The model knows Gerald.
Once a stay is inventoried and the deceased's Grief Fingerprintā¢ computed, GriefStay publishes a pseudonymized listing to our auction marketplace. Registered grief tourists ā individuals who have completed our Bereavement Credential Verification process or demonstrated documented existential curiosity via a 14-question onboarding questionnaire ā may bid on stays for which their SentimentTraceā¢ score achieves at least an 80% match. A 95% match at ā¬200 will beat a 68% match at ā¬500. Wealthy bidders who do not understand why they are being declined are provided an explanation. The model is not moved by their dissatisfaction. Neither, increasingly, are we.
Upon arrival, grief tourists receive a GriefDossierā¢ ā a 6-page document summarizing the deceased's travel personality, their most representative TripAdvisor reviews, their stated preference for room temperature and breakfast timing where recoverable from hotel records, and a single sentence our LLM generates to describe who, emotionally, this person was as a traveler. The dossier closes with the line: "You are not replacing them. You are completing something they started." We tested 34 versions of that closing line. The current version scored highest on what our UX researcher calls "bittersweet readiness." Guests are asked not to move the curtains from where the previous guest left them for the first night. Most comply. The ones who do not comply have reported feeling, in their post-stay reviews, that they made a mistake.
Each stay includes access to a GriefConciergeā¢ ā a human-AI hybrid support layer that can answer questions about the property, the deceased's known preferences, and what to do when the experience of being in someone else's unfinished room becomes more than anticipated. The AI component is available 24 hours. The human component ā our team of four trained bereavement companions and one hotel management consultant named Petra who joined for what she calls "the interesting operational challenges" and has stayed for reasons she no longer discusses ā is available daily between 9am and 9pm in the guest's local time zone. Petra handles the minibar questions. The bereavement companions handle everything else. There is frequently overlap.
Upon checkout, grief tourists are invited to submit a Completion Reviewā¢ ā a structured reflection on the stay that is, with family permission, appended to the deceased's TripAdvisor review history as a linked companion piece. The review asks three questions: What did you notice that they might have noticed? What did you finish that they could not? What will you carry forward? These reviews are processed by SentimentTraceā¢ and used to improve the model's understanding of grief tourism motivations. We have a mandatory 6pm laptop closure policy for the data annotation team. It is enforced with varying success. The reviews are very good. We mean this in a way that is difficult to explain.
Real testimonials from verified grief tourists who checked into someone else's unfinished story and found something they weren't expecting.
"My match was a retired school librarian named Dorothy who had booked four nights in Edinburgh and made it to the second morning. My SentimentTraceā¢ alignment was 97.1%, the highest GriefStay had recorded for a Scottish property. The dossier said Dorothy described hotel breakfast rooms as 'the most democratic spaces in civilized life.' I read that at 7:15am over her pre-booked porridge table and cried in a way I have not been able to fully explain to my therapist, though I have tried three times. I left the curtains as she had them. I am going back to Edinburgh in the spring. I don't entirely know why. The model probably knows."
Fiona Calloway
Grief Tourist, Edinburgh Stay Ā· Match: 97.1%
"I am a hospice chaplain. I was initially skeptical of GriefStay on what I would describe as professional and spiritual grounds. A colleague sent me the model card after a conference and I spent an evening reading it. The SentimentTraceā¢ methodology is, and I say this with full awareness of what I'm admitting, more emotionally rigorous than several grief frameworks I was trained in. I booked a stay in Dubrovnik ā a Croatian hotel where a retired Portuguese fisherman named Henrique had left two nights and a sunset dinner reservation. The model matched us at 91.3%. Henrique reviewed hotels the way I pray. Slowly. Looking for something specific. I think he found it. I think I did too."
Rev. Bernard Roux
Grief Tourist, Dubrovnik Stay Ā· Match: 91.3%
"I want to be honest: I originally booked because the discounted room rate in Reykjavik was genuinely excellent and I told myself the grief tourism angle was an interesting frame rather than something I was doing sincerely. I am a 34-year-old data analyst. I don't do sincerity easily. The GriefDossierā¢ for my match ā a woman named Astrid, 58, who had reviewed 340 hotels and described the Northern Lights as 'something that happens to you rather than something you see' ā made me sit down on the edge of the bed for a long time. I submitted a Completion Review. It was the most honest thing I've written in five years. Four stars because the minibar Toblerone was gone and that felt like something I should flag."
Magnus Lindberg
Grief Tourist, Reykjavik Stay Ā· Match: 88.6%
12.4K+
Stays matched
64
Countries covered
94.7%
Avg. match satisfaction
4.2M
Reviews in training set
Every tier includes a SentimentTraceā¢ match score and a GriefDossierā¢. The stay is someone's unfinished story. We price accordingly.
Wanderer
Auction + 12%
Our base tier. You bid, you match, you arrive. The room is yours to finish. GriefStay takes 12% of the winning bid.
Pilgrim
$29/mo + 8%
For serious grief tourists. Priority access, deeper dossiers, and GriefConciergeā¢ support for when the experience becomes more than a hotel stay.
Keeper
$199/mo + 5%
For those who have made grief tourism a practice. Curated matches, legacy review archiving, and access to the GriefStay estate partner network.
Ex-Airbnb, ex-palliative care, ex-NLP research, ex-hospitality. They all arrived here from different directions. The model understands why.
Amara Osei
CEO & Chief Grief Officer
Ex-Airbnb Trust Ā· Ex-Bereavement Researcher
Spent five years at Airbnb building trust and safety infrastructure and four years researching what happens to bookings when guests die ā a subject she describes as "something everyone at Airbnb thought about and no one spoke about." The idea for GriefStay emerged from a conversation with a hotel manager in Porto who told her that a guest's death left behind not just an unpaid invoice but what he called "a room that felt like it was waiting for something." She realized the room was right. She left Airbnb three weeks later. She has since given a TEDx talk about this. The standing ovation surprised her. She has watched the clip once. She found it hard to watch. We think she'll watch it again.
Dr. Yuki Kato
CTO & Model Architect
Ex-Google Brain Ā· Computational Grief Researcher
Published the only peer-reviewed paper on sentiment embedding in posthumous TripAdvisor review corpora, a paper she describes as "the most cited thing I've written and the one I least expected anyone to read." Built SentimentTraceā¢ over 19 months using a dataset she assembled by contacting the families of deceased prolific reviewers and asking for permission to include their loved one's reviews in a study of travel sentiment. 91% said yes. Many of them asked to see the results. She sends them the model card. Several have written back. The correspondence folder is kept separately from her work email. She checks it on Sundays. This is not in her job description. It has become, she says, the most important part of her week.
Dr. Nkechi Whaley
Chief Bereavement Officer
Palliative Care Physician Ā· Grief Tourism Academic
Has worked in palliative care for 16 years and published the academic framework on grief tourism that the GriefStay team read before founding the company. Was sent a cold email by Amara. Replied in 11 minutes. This is the fastest she has ever replied to a cold email. Joined three months later to build the ethical framework, the GriefDossierā¢ writing guidelines, and the protocol that governs what grief tourists are told, when they're told it, and how. Also manages GriefConciergeā¢ clinical oversight and the weekly debrief sessions for the bereavement companion team. Describes GriefStay as "the most ethically complex product I have been involved with and, possibly for that reason, the one I believe in most."
Petra Vanhanen
Head of Hotel Operations
Ex-Marriott Group Ā· Operational Pragmatist
Spent 14 years in hotel operations across the Marriott group before joining GriefStay for what she initially described as "the interesting logistical challenges of a room turnover model with a non-standard vacancy trigger." She has stayed for reasons she has described, in three separate team offsite conversations, as "harder to explain than the minibar reconciliation process, and the minibar reconciliation process is genuinely complicated." Manages the hotel partner network, the room-hold protocol, the curtain position documentation standard ā her idea, now in all 2,800 partner contracts ā and the minibar inventory audit. Has developed, over 14 months, what the team calls "a profound respect for the minibar as an artifact of character." She does not dispute this characterization. It no longer feels like an operational question.
GriefStay's hotel partners receive a 60% revenue share on auction proceeds plus the knowledge that they have participated in something that several journalists have described as "haunting in a way that is hard to articulate but also possibly fine."
We are still workshopping our hotel pitch deck. We are resisting pressure to reduce the ethics section. This is, we believe, the correct stance. Petra agrees. Her reasons are operational. Ours are not.