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Follow the history of the travel startup TravelStart

I had a chance to meet recently in London with Stephan Ekbergh the founder and owner of TravelStart who shared with me the long history behind TravelStart based in Cape Town, South Africa. Stephan is one of those entrepreneurs who speak truth, honesty, and eager to succeed for whatever he does.

So when he started on his blog sharing the history of his venture TravelStart, this confirmed my thoughts.

So if you want to know inside out how Stephan built up TravelStart, an online travel startup and also follow the up and downs of the company in the last year, you MUST read these columns. In my knowlegde, there is nothing like it available on the web where you can hear from entrepreneurs how they built  their online travel venture. The stories are so detailed that I think it deserves a separate blog on its own with the title "Ups and Downs of a successful online travel startup!"  or "TravelStart: why I never give up!"

I wish one day we could have more online travel entrepreneurs who can tell their stories as well like Andy Philipps and Adrian Critchlow (founders of Active Hotels) or Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox (founders of Lastminute.com).

Any idea about what Travolution is cooking?

One of the most reputable on line travel trade publication, Travolution - who has recently lost their chief editor Kevin May (see my video interview with him last year) to pursue other new interests in business media - is definitely cooking something. The website Travolution.co.uk was down most of yesterday and this rather bizarre page was coming up instead.

Is it me or such a page should be banned when your website in under maintenance. Why developers can't make up a more friendly page like Twitter does on their system outage.

Anyway Travolution is back up again today. But it makes me wonder why a publication like Travolution with such knowledge about the online industry doesn't apply the best practises about companies they report about (don't apply this one though)

WorldRes acquired by TravelHero - but why ????

WorldRes used to be the first hotel online search engine back in the early days of 1995 founded by Greg Jones (13 years ago!!!).

I remember this company very well. I was finishing my studies at IMHI/Essec Business school in 1999-2000, and I attended a conference at our school (I believe it was the IHRA conference). One of the speaker was from WorldRes (can't remember who it was) and was explaining how the Internet changed the dynamics of reaching people in the hotel world. And also how hotel bookings were migrating from phone towards online.

WorldRes was born and everyone thought it was simply THE dogs bollocks online hotel company. For whatever reasons (bad decisions, bad strange management, difficulties to manage costs...), the company didn't survive the Internet crash in 2001 and was literally loosing millions of dollars. I don't even remember it that company ever made a profit in any quarter. The planned IPO never happened and investors in the company started to worry.
WorldRes was beaten by bigger and clever companies such as Expedia, Lastminute, Travelocity and more importantly was loosing against new entrants in the online hotel space like ActiveHotels, Booking.com, HRS and of course Hotels.com.

After a lot changes in the management and subsequent redundancies (local offices were closed i heard), 2003 saw the renaissance of WorldRes as a joint venture with 3 leading hotel chains:
- Accor who already invested in the company back in 2000
- Six Continents (now known as Intercontinental Hotel Group with brands like Holiday Inn)
- Hilton International (Hilton Europe was a separate company from Hilton Corporation in the US)

I quote the former CEO of Accor "We have been a WorldRes partner and investor since 2000. They continue to interface with our central reservation system, thus using the best technology for selling our hotels online. We have agreed to invest and promote WorldRes Europe as the optimal means to find and book our hotels online. WorldRes Europe will make our hotel brands available to anyone with online access, including Web sites, call centers, tour operators and travel agents."

This sounds as a great idea but as we know it, a joint venture made with your competitors cannot always work (Andbook.com for instance was another failure on its own for example) and most of the time can go terribly wrong. A few years went by...

In 2005, when everybody forgot about WorldRes and thought the website was well buried, we hear that an Irish company Web Reservations International (WRI) buys WorldRes for an undisclosed sum. CEO and founder of WRI Ray Nolan says: "WRI has built a successful and profitable budget accommodation business, and this acquisition will significantly broaden our operations. We look forward to applying our unique business model to the global hotel market. We believe our emphasis on value and clarity will be highly attractive to existing WorldRes hotels and anticipate growing the WorldRes business as a part of WRI." 

So I believe WRI saw some great potential to make WorldRes profitable and bring more distribution partners. This sounded like a big challenge for the Irish company knowing that after 10 years of of Operations, WorldRes was still struggling to achieve profitability and also hardly raised their profile in the online travel space. Yes the inventory was there (30,000 hotels at that time before the acquisition) but what about consumers? How come other local new entrants were making much more noise (again ActiveHotels in the UK, Venere in Italy, HRS and Hotel.de in Germany, Booking in the Netherlands...) and seemed to get it right compared to the old brother WorldRes?

16 December 2008, we hear that WorldRes is acquired by a total stranger in my eyes called TravelHero. According to the press release in M-Travel and HotelMarketing.com, TravelHero based in Scottsdale, Arizona was founded by Rob Lamb in 1995 (same year as WorldRes) and has developed and operates the TravelHero online travel planning (I heard about StayPlanner, GoPlanIt but never read anything about TravelHero) and distribution system in addition to other proprietary reservation products and services including ResHero, EventHero and GolfHero. Again the deal doesn't say anything on the terms and how much World is worth today. My gut feeling is that WRI has decided to let WorldRes go elsewhere because they found it difficult to turn it around. WRI is better off expending and developing their great asset like HostelWorld who is a leading online hostel booking engine with a great value proposition (don't get  me started with Boo.com by the way...).

So what TravelHero is going to do with this old lady? The future will tell but I don't think there is much to do with it. Consumers in this very competive online travel landscape will be hard to seduce again.

Most commonly known mistakes made online

Mistake #5
Hoteliers book their hotel on sites like booking.com and post a review thinking they won’t get caught

read this story

Mistake #4
Hoteliers indicate their email address but it is hard to read (can you see it?)

Mistake #3
Hoteliers would love that you get in touch with them but they forget to leave their email address on their website

Mistake #2
Hoteliers keep ignoring TripAdvisor, Vinivi or VibeAgent reviews and don't respond to them

or any Britannia hotels really...

Mistake #1
Hoteliers forget to promote rate parity to their online distribution channels and their own website

too many examples to quote...

GHM Hotels new website

GHM Hotels - probably my favourite hotel group ever - has improved its new website and has a better navigation throughout. Having said that, the website is built in Flash, therefore not really SEO friendly. This is probably one of the common mistakes when building a hotel website.

I am not sure which next GHM hotel I should try on my next holidays. Maybe the Setai in Miami...

Trivop becomes VideoAgency

VideoAgency, the company behind Trivop (a leading online videoguide for hotels), has revamped its website and concentrates now on 3  task:

- Video  Production
- Video Search Engine Production (see the video interview with Marc Robertson from Reelseo)
- Digital Asset Management or how to manage  your videos to many video portals like Metacafe, YouTube,      Dailymotion

Video Agency CEO, Thomas Owadenko, has also launched its blog full of info and videos.

Have you heard of ReviewAnalyst?

ReviewAnalyst is a new tool that lets hotels take a proactive approach to consumer-generated hotel reviews, videos & images. The system aggregates user generated content via portals like TripAdvisor, Expedia or Yahoo Travel. With ReviewAnalyst, you can track, analyze and react to what people are saying about your hotel on the major travel and social media sites. The website advertises a start price at $99 per month.

This interesting service was developed by Standing Dog, a full service internet marketing agency in Dallas, Texas specializing in online travel and hospitality. Standing Dog is founded by the veteran hotelier Mike Wylie who stopped his blog in 2007.

Sheraton Roissy Paris Airport introduces the Link@Sheraton

The Sheraton Paris Airport located probably at the best location of Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport has introduced the Link@Sheraton. This new serviced oriented concept is about making the lobby a working area where you can connect free of charge to the Wi-Fi but also use one of their computers (webcam integrated). This is especially useful where you know your flight has been delayed. This new concept has been rolled out in 70 Sheraton hotels so far.

Have you experienced it already? Share your experience with us.

5 Internet companies that count for me back in 1998

I started to use the Internet for the first time, back at University in 1998 at ESSEC/IMHI School near Paris.

Now, at that time, you didn't have all the publicity around which websites you should go to and where to start. But I remember very well the services I used for specific queries.

Search Engine
in 1998: Dogpile
Today: mostly Google

Hotel Booking Website
in 1998: HRN (which became Hotels.com later on)
Today: too many too mention

Instant Messaging
in 1998: ICQ
Today: Skype or MSN Messenger

News Aggregator
in 1998: Net2One
Today: Netvibes

Email
in 1998: Essec university email (like 4543543tge@edu.essec.fr)
Today: Gmail mainly

What about YOU?

(HRN Homepage in 1998)               (ICQ Homepage in 1998)

The Milestone Hotel embraces Web 2.0

I am always looking for typical examples of how hotels have integrated web 2.0 tools in their B2C websites to disclose a bit more about what their hotel is a about.

The luxury hotel in London (a real 5 stars hotel!) The Milestone Hotel has added RSS feeds on its press section in order to get updates from the hotel and the hotel group Red Carnation. The site also explains very simply how to use RSS what is it for. Another step forward web 2.0 is the inclusion of podcasts with interviews from the general manager, the Food & Beverages manager or the hotel's butler. Quality of the podcasts is really good and the timing not too short and not too long. You could see that this hotel has really thought this through.

Did I tell you that the Milestone has one of the most exquisite tea time brunch in the city. in the winter, I enjoy spending a couple of hours with friends by the chimney on a Sunday afternoon in their library room.

Technorati Tags: milestones hotel, red carnation, travel 2.0, web 2.0, podcasts