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Comment by killion | Hacker News Reader

When I was starting Suiteness (YC S16) I found out after talking to hotels that it costs tens of thousands of dollars to connect to their backends. So I wrote a basic app in a weekend for "booking suites" but what actually happened was...

1. The user was filling out a form that was sent to me.

2. I would email hotels asking if they had suites available on the users dates.

3. I would enter their responses manually and the app would send a push notification to the user to see what I had entered.

4. Payment and everything else was done over email.

It looked legit, and during its peak I was doing it up to a hundred times a day. We are directly connected to hotels now so this doesn't happen anymore thankfully.

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I do contract work for a company in the travel industry and the founder of that company told me that they did basically the same thing when they started. He set up a website with hotels, etc. When customers called in, he would make the sale and afterwards call up the hotels and try to book rooms etc. If needed, he would call back the customer and change the booking. Basically optimistic strategy with rollback :-). Interestingly, he told me that at first he had no agreements with the hotels and had only a vague idea of rates, etc. He would just make it up as he went along, meaning that sometimes they would get a huge margin and sometimes he would take a loss. After he booked several rooms with a hotel he would then call them up to set up a contract. He apparently also started up the whole thing carrying just enough debt to cover the billing gap. Took no outside investment. Totally ballsy way to start up a travel company, but it worked pretty well (Doing hundreds of millions in sales per year these days).

That's a great example of manually bootstrapping an automated system!

> We are directly connected to hotels now

Once you implemented the backend connections, was the quote of "tens of thousands of dollars" accurate? Was that your development cost or some access fee required by the hotel (or their booking system provider)?

That sounds like a really good idea for testing out an idea. But im wondering - how did you go from this MVP to an actual product, when you were busy manually answering emails. How did you find the time? Advice is appreciated.

Why does it cost so much to connect to their backends? Aren't there platforms which they load their inventory on like Cloudbeds etc? I assume most of those would be modern enough to have web services to integrate with?

Why is it so expensive to connect to hotel's backends? Is that their fees?

I'm not sure this doesn't scale. I assume you made enough on a reservation to pay for cheap third world labor to do this at scale

Wow @killion. Legit as legit can be! Thx for sharing your story, will add it to the knowledge base I'm putting together.

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