My first interview was conducted with Mathieu Astier, Co-Founder and Marketing Director at QuickHotels.com, a new entrant in the hotel online world aiming to customise the hotel offer to individuals. (24/01/2006)
Guillaume Thevenot: How and when your company QuickHotels.com was founded? Mathieu Astier: QuickHotels.com was first built by Garth Lauckner in 2002 as Quick-Hotels.com as one of many Active Hotels affiliate websites. Garth Lauckner and myself set up an SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimisation / Search Engine Marketing) limited company called Okeedo in November 2005, a few months after I left my position of UK Distribution Manager at Active Hotels. We then decided to join our efforts around an already successful hotel booking website by acquiring the domain name QuickHotels.com from an American company and launched an improved site soon after.
What differentiates your website to other hotel booking engines?
Because the online hotel reservation market is a very competitive one, we are determined to make our style and image stand out from the thousands of hotel reservation websites currently available on the web. Our aim is to make Quickhotels.com a friendly, informal and approachable hotel reservation site in order to humanise the online booking process and render it more fun. One way to do that is to actually surprise our visitors by helping them find accommodation where they wouldn't expect us to… which is why we are currently developing geographical -focused pages offering a hotel reservation service around football world cup venues, rugby stadiums or concert venues for example.
Do you plan in the future to add other services like Air, Packages, and Destinations content?
At the moment we believe that there is still a huge amount of work to be done just within the hotel market. We are dedicated to covering that sector thoroughly before adding extra services that we do not master well yet. This does not mean that we are not open to partnerships with professionals within those specific industries and also others such as car rental, concert tickets airport parking and so on that could attracts more visitors.
Are you a profitable company?
Our business model, which is heavily dependent on those of our various accommodation providers, has allowed the website to become profitable a few months after its launch in 2002. We have a very cost-conscious approach, which now places us in a position to launch exciting marketing plans in the very near future.
What are you current accommodation providers?
We are currently working with ActiveHotels, Superbreak, Travelnow and CNG Hotels. We are in talks to integrate with Venere hotel stock with the aim to have a stronger coverage in Italy for example and other areas.
How many unique visitors do you have per month? How many bookings operates your website on average per day?
We currently attract around 5000 unique visitors per day, which generates around £400,000 in hotel reservations per month and are planning to double this figure in the next 6 months. The recent optimisation work we carried out as well as trialing various PPC (Pay Per Click) programmes have resulted in doubling our daily traffic from November 2005 until now. The new design we have launched at the beginning of January 2006 has also had a great word-of-mouth effect and has increased the ‘stickiness’ of the site.
Which segments of customers are you focusing on at the moment?
A large proportion of our customers are UK based and the split between leisure & business is about 60 / 40 %. We have plans to increase our presence in the corporate sector by offering SMEs a loyalty discount scheme.
Is the online hospitality industry just about making bookings for hotels? Is there anything else?
I think being an online hotel reservation website is about being flexible enough to move quickly to areas where new demands are developing. Our personal approach is precisely aiming at covering the largest possible segment of online bookers as well as converting new ones. Right now we believe that the leisure group bookings and the SME market offer opportunities for us to look forward to.
What are the 3 most important things your company will be focusing on in 2006?
#1 Strengthening the brand #2 Customer loyalty and #3 Investigating new technologies in order to improve our user experience. Following the recent UK legislation, we are also determined to ensure our site complies with accessibility guidelines so that our website is available to all.
What is your company role model at the moment?
Opodo for design & functionalities, Lastminute.com for communication, and Vente-Privee.com - a successful French shopping site - for attitude and Virgin for business sense.
Thank you Mathieu and all the best for 2006 with QuickHotels.com.
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