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Site Features:
hotels, air+hotel packages, destination information, road trip
planner, and information about the hotel discount IAN affiliate
platform.
Site Report:
Hotels.com is a site that most first time users know exactly what
to expect from when they arrive at the website.
The funny thing is
that the company didn't start out with a website and never wanted
to build a consumer brand in the first place. Most interestingly,
they actually didn't even start out selling hotel rooms.
The
company started in 1991 as an airline consolidator. The founders,
David Litman and Robert Diener were both Cornell Law School grads
who had taken an active interest in the travel industry. They saw
the inefficiencies in the air market. Soon after launching, the
founders saw that the hotel industry and decided to focus on that
side of the business. Because the hotel business had many more
suppliers, it was harder to consolidate them -- unlike the
oligopoly of the airline industry.
The company began as a call
center business promoting a toll free number to book reservations.
The fledgling company's concept was to approach hotels and offer
to fill their empty hotel rooms in return for a special net rate.
An early adopter, the company launched hoteldiscount.com in 1996,
and over time they shifted most of their business online. Always
on top of the numbers, Hotels.com understood the operational cost
advantage of letting the consumer go direct.
The company purchased Travelnow.com in 1999. With this acquisition they cemented
Hotels.com as the online leader in affiliate technology. Affiliate
sites are websites that link to a supplier site and get paid when
consumers they send to the supplier site buy at that site. In
Hotels.com's case, they have 25,000 of such sites. In the early
days of the company, this was really where all the growth came
from. Affiliates such as Travelocity Hotels and Cheaptickets as
well as less known sites helped to build the hoteldiscount
business into an online success story. Later on the company
purchased the domain Hotels.com from an affiliate site they'd been
doing business with. After the hoteldiscount/hrn company had gone
public they saw that growth was needed, and they determined the
way to get that growth was to build a consumer brand. This was
done with great risk. One, they needed to market against big
partner sites like Travelocity and Cheaptickets. Two, they ran the
risk of alienating their affiliate network. In the end, the
Hotels.com brand became an incremental source of growth that
outstripped the loss of the Travelocity and affiliate site
defections.
Today, Hotels.com is a leading provider of lodging
worldwide, offering reservation services through its own websites
(including
www.hotels.com and others), its interactive affiliate network
(www.IAN.com),
and its toll-free call centers at 1 800-2-HOTELS (1 800-246-8357).
Hotels.com offers travelers the widest selection of lodging
accommodations from traditional hotels to vacation rentals at over
12,000 properties in more than 400 cities in North America,
Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. The company offers a one-stop
shopping source for hotel pricing, amenities and availability, and
also specializes in providing travelers with accommodations during
sold-out periods.
The hotels.com website is an industry standard site. In
addition to searching through the net rate inventory that is
unique to the company, www.hotels.com gives the consumer an easy
booking experience. The Travelsites team thinks that the
Roadtrip Planner offering seems like it could use some
improvement, however.
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