Ask HN: Rate My Startup - LetMeGo: Let lodgings bid for your stay | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rate My Startup - LetMeGo: Let lodgings bid for your stay

letmego.com

45 pointstorrenegra54 comments

I'm currently employed in the hotel industry. I really have no defined role, but I perform a lot of the GM roles. I can give you a few things to think about.

First and foremost, the chain to which we belong just got out of a long fight with a large Online Travel Agency [OTA]. During this "fight", the chain really noticed that OTA's had a stranglehold on the online room distributions, especially the rates so in response, they have "initiated" some policies to nip that in the butt. (OTA's are currently killing Vegas)

I will show you the breakdown of our reservation distribution this year: 55% CHAINWEBSITE.com, 27% CHAIN Call Center, 9% GDS Travel Agencies, 9% Third Party Websites (broken down into Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity). In short, due to our policies we CANNOT offer a lower price outside of our best available rate available on the CHAINWEBSITE.com - we could null our franchise agreement.

I only speak for one chains policies, but this chain has 6k properties and another 1k or so in development. It's not small.

Thats one thing to think about. Some more thoughts:

Getting GMs to lower rates is tough; if you give guest X rate Y, and guest Z finds out, they also want rate Y. It sometimes makes a messy situation dealing with this. Selling rooms in important, but keep rate integrity intact is also important.

Chicken/Egg conundrum. How do you plan on getting hotels to participate?

-- In response to the above, I would personally like to search my geographical area for any travelers without having to sign the hotel up. Can I do that? Why not?

Some solutions to the above thoughts:

Instead of getting hotels to directly negotiate prices, why not use a combination of that and a GDS system like Amadeus, SABRE or Galileo. You know, so if a hotel doesn't bid on their trip to offer occupancy, then they have the option of making a booking through your system opposed defaulting to Expedia (which books through the same systems). It might solve the intermittency between the chicken/egg problem, and having an active user base - attracting one before the other would be essential. Overall, I don't think the hotel industry will take kindly to having to bid for guests. On the other hand, there is LOTS of money to be had and I wish you the very best. Its an ambitious start!

Thanks a lot for your feedback Matt. It is very interesting and valuable. I can tell you know a lot about the industry and how it deals with OTAs.

First of all, LetMeGo is not only about low prices: it's about offers customized for each traveler depending on his/her needs (VentureBeat nailed it down here: http://bit.ly/5vioZZ ). Nevertheless, given that LetMeGo's pricing is "semiopaque" (the bids submitted by the lodging are ONLY visible to the traveler that submitted the itinerary), we think that some lodgings will offer prices below what they publish in CHAINWEBSITE.COM. This would be relatively similar to the way hotels do with other opaque-pricing service like Priceline and Hotwire that allow them to forget about parity. Time will tell if this assumption is correct.

By the way, we are not counting on large chains for our success. In fact, we want to work primarily with independent and small hotels, bed and breakfasts, and the large vacation rental market. Our system has been designed with them in mind first. Why? Because this area of the industry has a lot of potential that hasn't been discovered yet, and because I am against large corporations with too much power.

In reference to the chicken/egg dilemma, we have secured access to large databases of lodgings. We are inviting them all to list their lodgings for free using a very intuitive interface. They will only pay us a 10% commission per booking after they get paid.

We are staying away from the GDSs for now because most independent lodgings don't use them (outside the US independent lodgings account for more than 80% of the market). Also, because our service, as I mentioned above, is about custom offers and service, and not only about real-time and the-lowest pricing.

I had the "pleasure" of chatting with the VPs of Revenue Management of two of the largest hotel chains in the US and in the world. As you predicted in your comments, they didn't like LetMeGo's model. That, for me, was a good sign.

Thank you Matt!

Glad I could help in some way. A few other thoughts I had after reading your response.

First, don't let the VPs of Revenue Management make you deviate from targeting chains. They have THEIR profits to account for, just like each hotel has their own profits to account for. In a way, this scares them because the revenue is not coming in through THEIR channels. If you think you can help a hotel in a chain profit, if you can prove it with data and you're passionate about it then go for them too! There are some really awesome online tools I want to use, but there are just so many policies that don't allow it. Hotel industry right now is stuck between being "innovative" and "head stuck in and around the ass cheeks region". Simply put, the hotel industry is dropping the ball in many areas where they can thrive. I would LOVE to work for a chic independent hotel doing marketing, I think I know enough about the industry and online marketing to help them immensely.

I am going to discuss it with the owner of the establishment I work at to check out the site and see what they think. They are fairly old school in their thinking and I am scared that they might fall behind. I have been trying hard to be persuasive in transitioning them into online marketing. They might be willing to test it out at their smaller property first and see how it goes. I may get back in touch with you via email in the next couple days.

All I can tell you when negotiating with sales/gm/owner is put emphasis on their value. They do want to fill a room, as a room is perishable just like a food item. A room not sold is a room that can never be sold again. Just a quick question with regards to bidding on a guest - does the hotelier see other hoteliers bidding? Or is this private?

Regardless, I am very interested to see how your venture plays out. Again, good luck!

Thank you Matt :)

Yes, lodgings see the bids from other lodgings in real time, including all the details. Why?

LetMeGo is a new service that allows travelers to submit their itineraries so that lodgings bid for their stays: http://letmego.com

LetMeGo is the result of the famous/infamous immersion discussed in here "Results of: 7 developers, working 24/7 for 90 days, 1 house (in Colombia)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730031

I know I don't participate a lot in HN. In part because I discovered you only a few months ago and in part because I've quite busy getting LetMeGo ready for launch. Anyway, I look forward for your feedback and to participate more and more in here.

Thanks!

Not too impressed by being told Chrome isn't good enough for your site!

I guess you used Chrome for Mac, right? Chrome for Windows is working fine. Maybe Chrome for Mac, too, but we haven't completed QA there yet. We will complete it soon, though.

Chrome for Linux gave me the same warning.

Yes, Chrome on Mac.

I get the warning with Chrome 4.0.249.64 on Windows.

Or Opera, for that matter.

(Edit: On a Mac, if that matters.)

By the way. The warning is triggered only if the browser you are using hasn't been fully checked with our site by our QA team; however, it may just work fine for you given that we tried to stick to many standards that most browser use (plus IE own "standards", of course).

It looks like you're whitelisting User-Agent strings, which is a ridiculously stupid idea.

You should only ever blacklist substrings in response to known issues, and regularly test that your assumptions still hold.

Just so that you know Chrome on Ubuntu also triggered the warning notice

I got a warning and I'm on FF 3.0.6 the catch: it's called Iceweasel and on Debian.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102814 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-3)

Having the same here with Chrome on Vista

I absolutely love the intro videos, especially the one narrated by Obama and Ozzy Osbourne

I agree, but I couldn't help thinking that a Christopher Walken video would really have sealed the deal for me.

I was confused by the video tour. I clicked watch video tour and was given the option of who to narrate it. Unfortunately I didn't know what that was. I thought I was looking at a rhetorical question along the lines of "you pick your favorite music, so how do you pick your favorite lodging?" or something like that. I'd suggest changing the heading of that to "Which narrator do you want?" or something with the word narrator.

That was my only nitpick. I tried out the interface and I love it. This is a really cool app that I find to be really well put together.. It does have the Catch 22 of you need lodgings to get users and users to get lodgings. Hopefully you find a way around that.

We will improve the interface for the video tours using the feedback you and the others (below) have provided. Thank you!

I'd get rid of the yellow note at the bottom---at least from the home page. You could handle uncaught exceptions and then display the note, for example, or put it in the About Us page.

Us Colombians are too polite, so it would probably be OK to display upfront if it was local. The Beta logo should be enough for most people. The note just predisposes users to think something might go wrong.

Indeed. The objective is to under-promise and over-deliver ;)

Looks good...but from a usability standpoint, would it kill you to label the fields? Which one is start date, which one is end date. What about i18n? "Where are you going?" is a little too ambiguous I think. I presume that's what you were going for, but locality can be quite granular. Hopefully there is an intuitive interpreter parsing that text.

Hmmmm... Good point. In fact, there in interpreter for that, but you've got a good point. We will try to make it easier to understand. Thanks Drew!

The layout reminds me of the food pyramid -> http://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-public/documents/image/... (Not a bad thing!) except the style of the layers is not consistent. Applying some color theory would certainly help. There seems to be ~9 different fonts on the front page. As for the concept of the site: the notion of inverting the business model is really neat, I hope it succeeds.

We will definitely reduce the number of fonts. And I though we had the number of fonts under control! I forgot to check the home page, though :S Thanks for noticing it!

I really liked in the video that you could skip ahead to different parts. What did you use to do that?

I liked the videos, and thought the different voices was an interesting gimmick, though I personally would load a video as soon as the user clicked the first link, and while it is loading give them the option to switch between voices. How many people click the first link without clicking to watch the video?

Thank you! It is a feature of FlowPlayer.

We will improve the home page so that one of the videos plays back automatically. Thanks for the idea.

Cool, but don't just take my word for it set up an A/B test, there are many great ideas friends have suggested, that the internet at large was not too thrilled about.

Looks really good, great design. A couple minor specific notes...

-"Lodgings" is an awkward word to use in the main description. I agree that it is the most accurate word to use, but I think few people think of the term "lodgings" when looking for hotels.

-Your "How it works" section looks cool, but it's an image. No text. That's not very semantic. It also means I can't copy and paste the description to tell a friend.

Thank you Steve. You are right. We have had several hours of discussions in reference to the proper word to use ("lodging" or any other) and we have not been able to come up with a definite solution.

We will change the "How It Works" area today as per your suggestion. Thanks!

My vote would go for something like "accommodations". I think it's a little more mainstream.

I love this idea. I'll try it out on my next trip. I love the videos they're awesome - although since your site looks AJAX-ie you might want to consider opening the videos in a "lightbox" popup - I tried several times to find the close button on the first video I opened - because I didn't realize it open a new page ...or you can just sum it up to my stupidity :p

Thank you Tyohn. We decided to go with separate URLs for better SEO, but we will try to make it clearer for visitors :)

my thoughts:

too many options for the video tour. i mean, i didn't have a problem figuring it out, and i enjoyed what i saw, but you're going to find that some users will get confused. from the standpoint of converting customers, provide a default and start it playing, and then provide other options if they want to get silly.

i'm not sure how i feel about the red box on the map. i kind of think that it should be a bit more static, so that it doesn't automatically re-search each time the zoom changes or i scroll the map. but i can't think of a good solution off the top of my head.

there are a few references to st.hal.biz, where its clear that it should be just hal.biz. example: http://st.hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif is showing up as a broken image vs http://hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif

I agree. I would suggest having one of them already opened, with tabs for the rest.

Great ideas for the videos! Thank you. We will try to implement them ASAP.

The "bounding box" idea is quite experimental. Your feedback is highly appreciated!

We definitely have an issue pointing some links to our staging environment. Thank you for pointing that out.

Looks pretty cool.

When I was on the 'iternerary' view the bar at the top of the screen changing colors drove me crazy though.

Thank you! Would you mind sharing the link with me? I am not sure to which interface you were referring to.

http://letmego.com/submit/toronto?G_type=AREA&check_in=2...

Just change any of the options on the side and you'll see what I mean.

I see. You are right. It may become annoying. Thank you for the tip. We will work on it!

I`m using Chrome/Ubuntu 9.10 and got the warning message. Everything worked fine though.

After selecting my travel dates, I got the impression that the whole page would scroll down, not just the left column. It was a bit confusing I think.

I´m not a fan of nesting scroll bars.

I will test the service out for real in a couple of months.

I won't repeat what others said above, but I will add that I feel the home page is too gray / dark. The "search" page has a better color balance than the homepage. The way it is now it's rather depressing, and less inviting. Pretty nice otherwise.

Are you able to share what strategies you have for increasing participation among lodgings businesses? It seems to me that this would be a big challenge and a huge factor in your success, and I am curious how you address it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066008

great idea and great execution (from what I can see). The narration idea is very original with the video intro. But I do agree with other commenter that it was odd to have to pick a narration. I'd suggest you pick the one you like best or which best shows off the capabilities, and just use that, or rotate through them. Even though you went through the effort to create the different videos, it is best to keep something like that simple for the user.

Where did you get all of the hotel data (rating, amenities, types, of rooms, pictures, etc.)? Are the hotels that sign up required to submit that information?

Yes. They are required to sign up and provide all the info.

Cool looking site .. but where did you get the voice from?

My other startup: http://voice123.com

..for the vids.

Great idea. I will use it next time I travel and if I get a great deal I'll be a loyal customer.

Damn. I was hoping you were making an app to let landlords bid on desirable tenants.

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