Hotel Blogs by Guillaume Thevenot

Does Oyster.com have the mussels to compete with the big boys?

Something you should know is that I love seafood. One of my "food sins" when I go back to my home country is to have a full "plateau de fruits de mer" or just a dozen of oysters (Gillardeau usually). 

So when I heard that a new website was launching this week called Oyster.com...I was somewhat intrigued by it. 
Could it be a website about oyster delivery? My dream finally comes true - especially in England where oysters are not so popular and very hard to find in fishmongers. Or could it be a website about this blue Oyster card we have to use on the London Underground?
My instinct was wrong. Oyster.com is another player who decided to battle against TripAdvisor to bring more "relevant" reviews written by independent journalists experts reviewers. The site claims that every hotel has been visited and their room paid for. 
So it there such a thing already in the marketplace? Well, we do have hotels reviewed in paper newspapers like The Sunday Times. We also have hotels reviewed in lifestyle magazines like CondeNast Concierge. Online, we have websites like The Hotel Guru in partnership with Worldreviewer (founded by James who I interviewed last year). or TravelIntelligence who found a niche in boutique, design and original hotels around the world. Finally, you can argue that everyone is an expert - once you stayed in a hotel - to review your hotel stay. You don't need to be a professional writer. You just need to be honest.
So what Oyster can bring more that we don't already have?
Better structure of reviews, more pictures (meaning hundreds) and professional writing. 
In a way this seems to me the alternative of reading a 2 pages review of a hotel in a travel specialist magazine. Surely, there is a share of the population who gets inspired and take decision on where they are going to spend their holidays by reading these professional reviews (I am not one of them). 
Yes the website is very nice and pages are well structured. For instance, it's very easy to find what the reviewer thought about the food, the scenery or even better whether it is family friendly.

The pictures tab is divided into sections where you can flick through pictures about the bathroom, reception, bedroom, swimming pool and so on. Look how many pictures are available for the Fontainebleau. Reviewers are also asked to take pictures when they stay at the hotel. Hence why you have some many. It's true they look like professional pictures but these days with the high quality camera material you can get for nothing, I am not surprised pictures come this well. For the Fontainebleau, there are 110 pictures of the Deluxe Guestroom...

Now, if we look at the scalability of this business, I am thinking how long will it take to Oyster dedicated writers team to cover enough hotel content around the world? Or is it actually we don't really need 400,000 hotels + these days. Maybe a few here and there with professional reviews are sufficient. How long this content can be reliable for the consumer in the long run? 1 day ? 3 months ? 1 year? When I browse review sites like TripAdvisor or Vinivi or Trivago, I more likely to see the 5 more recent reviews rather than the one reviewed a year ago. Same thing applied to restaurant review sites like TopTable or London Eating.  I don't base a judgement whether I should try a restaurant on a Gilles Coren review written a year ago. I would take advice from 5 reviews posted in the last 2 weeks. What is more relevant?

2 questions come to my mind.

1/ What makes me a professional reviewer? On which criteria Oyster select their writers?

2/ Do I get paid by review submitted? If yes, how much?

As you can read, I am divided by the relevancy of the content in the long run. It looks to me that Oyster is trying to do a better job than what hotels publish on their website in terms of description/pictures. They just orgarnize the information much much better. Is that sufficient to make this venture a profitable business in the long run? Time will tell.

Do we need a meta meta search engine called Tripeedo...seriously

My favorite online travel trade publication Travolution has  announced the launch of another "Trip" company called Tripeedo.

Something that amazes me (still) these days is the lack of innovation or bright new ideas that come up in the online travel space.

I mean Tripeedo aims not to be another meta search engine but wants to sit above that ...meaning the start up founded by Andrew Dudly  aims to - I quote -  "allow for quick comparisons of metasearch sites, airlines and OTAs - so it’s metasearch on top of that. It’s a single point to launch searches to different sites, reducing a process that takes a long time to a few minutes."

I just don't see what problem Tripeedo is trying to solve. Meta search engines facilitate the search of multiple travel websites in one user interface. A site that compares meta search engines and OTAs is just nonsense. I mean who wants dozens of windows open in your browser.

I was doing a search in New York on Firefox with all OTAs and Hotel Chains websites. When Firefox discovered that 30 windows will be opened, it just declined it (Thank You Firefox by the way, you are brilliant!)). Also how could you really compare results if you need to navigate between different windows?

Anyway, another flawed idea that would never take off (again my opinion only). If I had $100,000 in the bank, I wouldn't touch this search problem, I would do something else. You can't keep up with innovation coming from big guys like Kayak with such a small investment.

As Julie Meyer said in the title of her article at City A.M. "Entrepreneurs must show an appetite for risk", I just don't see the risk in this new venture...

 

TDS Europe 09 - Get Funded

The 2nd day at Eye for Travel Distribution Summit started with the Get Funded session (my favourite part of the conference) where 4 start ups in travel will pitch their business to 4 celebrities of the travel space (Dick Porter founder of STA Travel, Hugo Burge Founder or CheapFlights and angel investor with HowzatMedia, Gerry Samuels from Mobile Technologies and Travel Capital and Steve Endacott from the LowCostGroup.

Strangely the winner of the start ups competition will only get attention from the audience and media trade since not further funding will be added by the judges (is there any money left?) so it is not really following the rules of Dragon's Den (in fact it changed the name of the session from last year).

So 4 new ventures were competing against each other to claim the votes from the small audience available this morning.

Ian Champness from TravelWhere believes in digital brochures because "brochures are here to stay". Apparently 200M brochures are printed every year in the UK with an estimated cost fo £400M with 22 to 1 booking conversion rate. The company will drive revenues from PayPerClick, Digital Brochure hosting and Affiliate commissions. Since Jan 09, the website has generated 10,000 pages view and 118 brochures have been loaded. The company needs a further £500K investment to be the leading affiliate marketing partner.

Zoombu founded by Rachel Armitage and Alistair Hann and  is a travel journey planner that works with your mobile GPS location. Revenue will be made from affiliate commission (1-3% from Air and 15% from cars, taxi, hotels). The young company expect to make an average of £6 revenue per booking. Also Zoombu aims to reach directly the consumer or through partner sites with the Zoomby product with "Powered by Zoombu" embedded in Airlines sites for instance. The whole idea of Zoombu is to compare price, journey time and carbon footprint in the same results in one go. They need an investment of £300,000.

Then came Joobili founded by Jared Salter and Tamas Gabor who tries to respond to the question "Next month I have a long weekend break, where should I go? The site is very simple and asks you to choose a date when you will leave and when you have to go back, the site will take care of the rest, meaning inspiring you. Revenue streams come from affiliates programs a la Amazon with also targeted advertising. The company already received $100,000 seed fund. They have loaded about 1,200 events in the database and works with national city organizations. They already have a venture capitalist (VC) already interested to invest and they would need a further investment of £300K in order to grow the company and achieve more than half a million members by year 5.

The last contestant was TourDust founded by Ben and Anna Colclough. The company aims to be the leading curated collection of inspiring long tail adventure tours and holidays. This holiday segment has been underserved for some time now and poorly executed online. They want to target independent travelers and would like to bring around 20,000 independent authentic tour operators in one place. The site raised £90K which is half self funded. The site is in beta since January 09 and had some nice media coverage like The Guardian or The Independent. They would need £350K to grow the company with a better reach to online consumers. Interesting enough, 57% of consumers book and travel online in the same 15 destinations. 

Did you know TurnHere turned into Travel

TurnHere, a video online production company has turns into travel by opening their travel site TurnHere.Travel. In there you can view videos of people talking about their visit of a city but also check out some hotels or attractions around the world.

TurnHereTravel.tv feature videos from the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau and other cruise line, hotel and hospitality partners, giving travelers an engaging inside view into top attractions, regional cuisines, cultural destinations and so on.

The site is offering customers (most travel related companies in this case) syndication across leading Web sites including Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Travelocity, TripAdvisor and TurnHere's branded YouTube channel.

Nearly a year has passed since the opening of this new site, not sure if the team has been able to grow the content that much. I still see a lot of content in the US but not so much elsewhere.

How to find cheap hotels in Europe

Cheap Cheap Cheap! This is the buzz word of the moment (if not the year) because everyone is having shrinking wallet and hope to save money to their next hotel stay compared to past years.

EuroCheapo based in New York is a budget travel website founded by Pete Meyers along with his business partner (and brother), Tom. 

EuroCheapo has a team of travel writers based in  Rome, Paris, Berlin and more who help the website's mission of enabling travelers to find “diamond in the rough” budget hotels throughout Europe

Their approach is significantly different given their unique focus on combining in-house editorial and only including individually selected properties that adhere to their listing requirements. Editors have personally visited and reviewed thousands of hotels in Europe and feel EuroCheapo is one of the most effective and focused sources for travelers to find high value, low cost accommodations.

Their booking engine search hotels and rates from affiliates partners like Venere.com, Booking.com or HostelWorld.com.

The business model is on revenue sharing with OTAs like the ones mentioned below and also advertising from Google.

 

TravelPost.com vs. TripAdvisor: it's all subjective

First of all, I don't think TravelPost.com is the first company trying to compete with the almighty TripAdvisor on hotel reviews.

In the past 2/3 years, we have seen:

* Vinivi for European consumers
* VibeAgent with a fantastic user interface
* Zoover who won 3rd best start up at Le Web08 conference
* Trivago backed up by Hoozat Media
* HotelCombined with more than 2 million reviews aggregated

and more small niche review sites (by country, city, type of hotels) are available to the public.

So when I hear TravelPost is a "serious" competitor, let's not forget these ones as well.

To gain traffic and usage, I believe any of these challengers need to bring something new on the value chain rather than slashing your number 1 competitor by telling it pollutes the Internet.

Also anyone with no commercial acumen or any idea how to make money with these sites will die soon.
On the same article from Travolution, Steve Hafner, CEO of Kayak.com who owns TravelPost.com says that Tripadvisor had become very “commercially driven.”.  End? Wha'ts the problem with that? TripAdvisor is part of Expedia Inc, a public company trading on the US stock market. So their Number 1 goal is to make profits. Doesn't Kayak aim to make money with TravelPost as well?

I believe it's good that TravelPost has been revived and I welcome their "can do attitude" trying to make a better job than TripAdvisor when it comes to provide unbiased hotel reviews. Let's not forget that TripAdvisor has more than 20M reviews with a daily traffic that a lot of online travel start ups would die for. Let's see how long it will take  for TravelPost to come this kind of mass usage and recognition.

Today, TravelPost aggregates 1/2 million reviews from 140,000 hotels. To be continued...

Interview with Daniele Beccari from Isango at Le Web08

Isango is a fairly new venture in the travel space who recently raised $8M from VCs like Spark Ventures (who backed Lastminute.com in the early days). The company was created by the former Ebookers director Ranjan Singh.

The company aggregates all the different travel experiences that a traveler might be interested to book in advance prior to his trip. Things like trekking, day tour of Paris on a Segway, wine tasting, cooking lessons are among different activities you can find on the website. They already have a different strategy of positioning their offers from one country to another.  They compete directly with DoSomethingDifferent.com.

I believe this will be an interesting company to watch in the next year. Their value proposition complements other websites that solely concentrate on obvious travel components such as Air, Hotel, Car and Tranfers (and Trains sometimes).

I have asked Daniele Beccari, VP Operations for Europe, how Isango is making money, their growth looking forward, what are the things they will concentrate for next year and also how easy it was to raise capital from VCs in Q1 this year.

Have you ever heard of StayPlanner.com ?

Have you ever wished to organize every step of your business or vacation trip online and list every thing in one tool? Well, StayPlanner has been working on this for the last 12 months and is about to release a B2B2C platform enabling travel suppliers to provide their customers with a value added planner to find and book leisure services at their travel destination. Through their simple user interface partners, travel suppliers, could easily choose, edit and add content presented on the platform and therefore provide a personalized solution to their customers while keeping the brand service level.

StayPlanner has already its white label version. For instance, if you are a hotel chain or an independant hotel, you may adopt StayPlanner linked to your back office which enables:

- After the booking, the staying location will be placed on the map, relevant dates in the calendar and personalized search results
- add hotel services (spa treatment, restaurant) + add "call me" for free
- Add hotel partner services (car rental, shuttle service, limousine)
- Prepare readymade StayPlanners (family, business, romantic)
- The StayPlanner can include all events and services offered by the hotels
- Readymade StayPlanner for conference participants with schedule already presented to their outlook calendar before their arrival
- StayPlanner created by past hotel guests who would like to share with future travellers (mini social network)
- Get reports on activities done by guests during their stay

The company behind StayPlanner is adding more partners in order to offer a lot of content in any destination of the world. I could have used this service when we went to Ubud - Bali prior to to our arrival instead of choosing the best excursion when we arrived at the hotel (where we were totally exhausted and wanted to dive in the swimming pool rather than staying at the reception reading all the different tours available).

The service is really interesting and could be very handy for organized holiday travellers and business people need to schedule everything before they go.

The website is still in beta mode and by invitation only but you can already have a flavor of the product by looking at this demo.

Have you heard of Unpackaged.com ?

Unpackaged.com is a worldwide accommodation and transfers online specialist with more than 17,000 hotels and villas. Among them, you can find exclusive properties in Italy including apartments in Cannaregio Venice, minutes from St Marks Square or a 15th Century Villa with swimming pool in Castelnuovo Gafagnana, Tuscany or a cowboy ranch over looking the sea in Civitavecchia, Lazio. They currently do a November promotion for Sharm El Sheikh hotels. The company is based in Birmigham with a dedicated agent call centre and they are ABTA bonded. (Association of British Travel Agents).

GoPlanit at TechCrunch50

One travel related company has presented its venture to the TechCrunch50, this is the video of their presentation with Q&A at the end. I think they have done a good job so far. It looks easy to handle and bring something new to the travel planning exercise. Problem remains for the quality of content available though.