Roomblocker (YC S15) is modernizing hotel booking for groups | Hacker News Reader

Roomblocker (YC S15) is modernizing hotel booking for groups

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26 pointsmeghani28 comments

Congrats to Dave and Mike, who are solving a real pain point for groups organizing hotel bookings.

Thanks for the post! Founder here, happy to answer any questions about Roomblocker.

What's the backend? How do they connect with the hotel systems? Personally negotiating with hotels (something my former employer/now owned by Expedia spent a fortune on) seems hard to scale.

Great point, and you're right - personally negotiating with hotels is hard to scale. Our customers really like that we do this for them so they don't have to, and we're streamlining this to make it faster and easier on both ends. We're being really careful with which steps we "automate", since group hotel bookings is a very people-centric industry.

Congrats Dave/Mike. Like your idea and the pain point it is solving in group bookings. I wanted to know how are you differentiating from much bigger player like Priceline findgroupdeals.hotelplanner. I think features like user interface, link to room block, assigning personal advisor are something which aren't difficult for them to implement. Can you pl shed more insight on actual differentiation?

Hey there, we actually think these are all really important differentiators. They might seem simple or arbitrary, but they're really hard to get right and are incredibly important to planners and guests. Of course we have a playbook for creating barriers to entry from a strategic standpoint, but we think getting the product experience right and focusing on the things that matter to our users is the #1 thing we can do.

Congrats on the launch Dave and Mike! With ~30% of hotel revenue generated from meetings and events, this is a hugely important business for the hospitality industry.

How are you comparing your offering to a player like Cvent? Their supplier network allows event planners to search venues / have different hotels submit RFQs for free. It would also be great if you can share a little bit more on the customer demographics you are targeting as well as the type of hotel partners you are looking to onboard.

TLDR - we streamline group bookings for every step of the way, from getting the best group rates to helping you fill and manage your room block.

Thanks for the question. There's a few important things that we're doing differently from anyone else:

1) Roomblocker is for all groups - for corporate events (conferences, offsites, etc), personal events (weddings, family reunions, etc), and social events (student trips, sports travel, etc).

2) We match you with a real person to personally negotiate the best rates and terms. There's no fees and we don't mark up rates. Other solutions just forward you quotes from hotels and then you're on your own.

3) After you've booked, we provide a dashboard and a link to your room block so guests can easily reserve their rooms online. You don't have to mess around with spreadsheets, or provide an obscure call in code, or send guests to some clunky hotel site.

We're also doing small things that help streamline group bookings, for example integrating e-signature so our users don't have to fax paperwork back and forth with hotels.

There's a ton of opportunity in this space and we're excited to help bring this industry forward!

Looks very polished, and for the bid->award pipeline, a lower-friction path to getting a hotel booked for a group.

Can you elaborate a bit on differences between your offering and Passkey, from both the event management and event attendee/delegate perspective?

Thanks! The #1 requested feature from our users was a better way to fill and manage a room block once it's booked.

Passkey is a great tool that was originally built for hotels, but it's an awful experience for planners and attendees - frequent errors that prevent attendees from booking their dates, annoying alerts, and an overall clunky user experience.

We wanted to put the planner in control and build a modern user experience around it.

I thought this was silly at first. Looking deeper, I realized that with Airbnb etc, group bookings will likely become more and more important for the traditional hotel industry, as it is something that most Airbnb hosts can't offer.

We couldn't agree more. Groups is an important segment for hotels (25% of all bookings), especially with Airbnb taking away from the other segments.

I'd recommend jumping on team travel. Low hanging fruit, no significant players there yet, though some are trying.

Great idea, do you know any teams that might be interested in trying us out? :)

You have to pitch tournament organizers. In exchange for a share of the savings tournament organizers mandate that teams use your service (could be hundreds of teams if it's a big tourney).

There are a lot of little companies doing exactly this, and tourney organizers are used to being pitched on it.

These little companies just put up a cheap Wordpress and use a service like Alliance on the backend, which is basically room blocking & invitations as-a-service. Not a particularly large barrier to entry. However, your site is by far the nicest & obviously has a lot of other advantages by virtue of YC.

Thanks and we will definitely look into this more. If you know of any specific tournaments that you'd recommend targeting, would love to hear from you dave@roomblocker.com

I'd recommend googling such team travel sites, they usually list tourneys they work with, and then just make the call & pitch them to switch. I don't think it would be that hard of a sale tbh given the nature of some of these companies.

Anyways, enough unsolicited advice from a random guy on Hacker News :) Good luck to you all.

Great advice and appreciate it!

Not sure how serious you guys will be about it, but just know, a big tourney can mean 1k + rooms booked through such a service (incl. rooms for families for younger age group sports), and of course there are a lot of big tourneys every week, across sports & ages, everywhere (in America at least). A site only dedicated to group booking for sports tournaments could probably be it's own successful YC company (obviously with the right team). Just letting you know of this opportunity from someone who used to work in said industry (but has had enough of it).

We're definitely taking this seriously. Sports is a big market and you're right it's totally underserved. We've looked at some of the more specialized solutions you mentioned and there needs to be something much better.

One of the things we're working on to better support sport teams is helping with roommate assignments. We've done some of this manually so far and know how painful it can be, so now we're building it into Roomblocker.

We'll be doing outreach to tournaments, leagues, and teams - if you have any contacts would be great to connect. Either way, thanks for your help!

I know an HS basketball coach. I don't know how coaches do room bookings for high schools, but I'll throw your name his way to see if it sticks. Cheers.

Hey that'd be awesome, thanks for helping out! My email is dave@roomblocker.com

Random side note: I met my co-founder playing basketball. Good way to test a person's character ;)

This is a great idea. Can the founders shed some light on how they came up with it?

Thanks! We both worked at Salesforce, which is a huge events-driven company, and room blocks were always a huge pain point for attendees and also for planners. I also organized group trips in college and high school which I think planted the seed.

Good to see two hard working founders build a simple median for hotel booking.

Thanks for the kind words!

congrats dave!!!

Thanks Ju!

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