Hotel Blogs by Guillaume Thevenot

And another trip company...

Where this will all end ?

TripKick is one the new trip company which has launched its website.

Thanks to Alex who brought up the story.

UPDATED - Too many Trip companies ?

John Kent (Founder of YouTravel) and his blog

I was glad to discover that another key executive figure in the online travel space has opened his blog.

John Kent - former founder of MedHotels acquired by Lastminute in 2004 for £22.6M - has decided in 2006 to develop another "bedbank" called YouTravel with the help of VC funds from Barclays Ventures.

John has set up his blog around the time of the WTM last year in November. Interesting to see his background and how well he's been succeccful in his previous businesses. He also has a website about him here.

Last post he wrote was about the appointment of Graham Nichols at the position of Group Managing Director for YouTravel (Graham is ex Worldspan VP EMEA).

Do you know BedBazar?

BedBazar is one those new entrants I have discovered recently.

They aim to link travelers with flats/house owners who wish to rent their home whilst they are going away for holidays. The website also offers alternative accomodation content like Bed & Breakfast, Guest Inns and more.

BedBazar works with more than 35,000 flats/houses aorund the world.

This summer, more than 3,000 travellers will be connected with house owners in Canada.

The website is available in 6 languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian) and has been founded by a French and Canadian team. I will try to get a video interview with the team when I will be in Paris.

WAYN What?

TechCrunch UK has reported yesterday that WAYN was in talks with AOL for a possible sale of the travel social networking for an estimated £200M.

Annika Erskine - PR Manager for WAYN - has made a response here.

My first reaction to the news is I don't believe it. The company expects to bring $4.5M in revenues this year with about 10M subscribers. The valuation of the company would be 44 times the revenue it brings (let alone the profits!).

This is really crazy valuation in my mind. But if this is true, I can't be happier for Jérome and Peter.

I found the story to good to be true and funny enough comes out at the same time of the Eye for Travel conference in London where Jérome Touze (founder or WAYN) was speaking on Wednesday. Coincidence or a nice PR move ? I let you be the judge.

After the TechCrunch story, the blogosphere and traditional media haven't waited too long to report the story. HotelMarketing.com even made the story its headline for yesterday. Shocking...

You can find other comments about the story in:

M-Travel (Eye for Travel)

Travolution "AOL to buy WAYN?"

Alex Bainbridge "WAYN - Will AOL Yes No?"

Rate the guests rather than getting reviewed

Customers have a wide choice of platforms when they can rant or share their good experience about their latest hotel stay. TripAdvisor, VibeAgent, Vinivi and all major online travel agents encourage people to review hotels.

But hoteleliers have been left on their own regarding how to (re) act and have their say when something went really bad at their property. I remember in June 2005 at a London conference that a hotelier was quite keen to also review rate their guests when they were impolite, damaging their rooms, didn't pay their bills and so on.

This online tool / solution exists, it's called Happy Guests. You have to register to access the different services offered by Happy Guests. You can alert other hoteliers with a severity from 1 to 5 if one of your guests have not behaved whilst staying at your hotel. See the screen shot.

But...and there is always a but...I am not sure that displaying the guest name + the city and the postcode of the guests is really legal. These information shouldn't not be disclosed (ever hear of the data protection act in the UK?). The website states "Guests recorded on the database can be searched for by name, postcode  or category type."

The company behind it is based in Torquay and their mission is simple "The driving force behind the Happy Guest web site is to help our Hotels, Guest Houses and Apartments, become better places to stay in. Guests who check-out Happy, will come back".

If you are a hotelier and you are already using this service, let us know more about this...For the others, any thoughts about the possibility of having your name down to this database?

Technorati Tags: happy guests, happyguests.co.uk, hotel reviews

Have you tried Paguna? What's new since 2006?

Have you ever dreamt to look, find and book a hotel on the same single webpage without using the back and forth button on your browser. Well, it is definitely possible thanks to Paguna.

Paguna is a booking engine aiming to make the booking process online as simple as possible. Paguna uses the latest Ajax technology to make the website more intuitive and simpler to use.
You make your hotel booking in 3 simple steps (Search, Select and Book). At the moment, it looks like the site is still in its infancy and doesn't have many hotels booking online. At step 3, when I try to book a hotel in Paris, a box says to me that the hotel will receive my request.

I think this is an interesting project and needs to be pushed at the next level.

What do you think? Let us know by responding to this quick question below.

VibeAgent is alive and kicking

Adam Healy, CEO of VibeAgent has announced during the PhocusWright conference that the site is finally available to the public. Congratulations to Adam and the rest of the team !!!

VibeAgent is growing

Still in its beta testing phase, the reviews and travel social community site VibeAgent has more than 2,500 registered members. Not bad at all...With some funding from TRX, I am sure the growth of this exciting new venture has just begun...

I still have 15 invitations to the beta site left in case you are interested.

FreshTV aims to be the YouTube in Travel

Travolution yesterday announced the launch of FreshTV, the first online TV channel where travellers talk about their latest holiday experience. FreshTV is in partnership with FreshHolidays, property of the On Holiday Group owned and managed by Steve Endacott. For the moment, 25 videos have been posted. Travellers report back about their apartment in Martinique or their hotel in Magaluff. What's different from what I have seen before is that people are filming themselves talking about their holidays rather than showing the property or the resort they stayed in.

As Kevin May from Travolution rightly said, I challenge this new web 2.0 initiative to see people giving a negative comment about their stay face to face on the camera. The reason why TripAdvisor is so popular with the good and bad reviews is because people are just writing words and it's very hard to put a face to their past customers from a hotel point of view (unless they have mentionned their lastname and date where they have stayed in the hotel).

Something interesting is that travellers who posted a video get incentivised. Please tell me more...How much? Does that mean I get a night free at the hotel?

As mentionned before on HB, I have put together my different hotel videos from my trip in Oman and Dubai and this work is very much time consuming. Why?

This is a scenario for a 6 minutes movie.

1. Transfer the movie into the computer = 10 minutes
2. Edit / Cut / Paste / Add music / Remove useless native sound = 20 minutes
3. Convert the avi file into a lighter file (because site like YouTuve only allow 100MB per movie) = 5 minutes
4. Upload the movie in YouTube, Dailymotion: depends on your connection but recently I have experienced a 30 min transfer for a 70 MB movie

Total: nearly 1 hour.

So I am very pleased to hear that for a change a travel company is going to give me a bit of money for my hard work...Can I get more if the video is exclusively distributed on FreshTV?

That's the other thing...there is new market in online video distribution. To get a good coverage, you need to upload your video in :

YouTube, Dailymotion, TripAdvisor, Vinivi, VibeAgent and now FreshTV...

I am looking forward to hearing more from that project.

Steve introduce the concept on this video.

Technorati Tags: freshtv, fresh tv, on holiday group, fresh holidays, steve endacott