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Booking.com – The Company that Changed the Course of Online Hotel Booking

One of the challenges, while travelling and touring, is ‘staying at a hotel.’ Staying at a hotel gives a traveller either the best comfort in the trip, or it becomes the worst part of the vacation. That being said, it is undeniable that booking a hotel is the key to a perfect vacation. However, booking a hotel in a place that is unknown to self is a challenge, and hassle to the mind. Booking.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine for lodging reservations, and steps in to help you with booking a hotel.

booking.com office
Image Source: officesnapshots.com

Booking.com’s journey started when Booking.nl was founded in 1996 by Geert-Jan Bruinsma after he graduated from college. He discovered the internet and borrowed code from Hilton.com to open a hotel website. Booking.nl was merged with another hotel-booking site Booking online, which operated as Booking.org. On the other hand, in Cambridge, UK, in 1999, cousins Andy Phillips and Adrian Critchlow founded Activebooking.com, which focused more on independent hotels. Later, the name of the internet website was changed to Active Hotels. It too copied some of the basics from WorldRes business model.

Active Hotels and Bookings went on to become the leading hotel-bookings in their respective markets and beyond. Both the ventures met at a travel trade show in London. Years after, both caught the eyes of Priceline.com’s chief mergers and acquisitions master, Glenn Fogel. He put in the efforts to buy both the ventures. The deal took place in 2004 for Active hotels, and in 2005 for Bookings. Priceline then merged both the companies and created Booking.com (Under Booking Holdings), which changed the course of online travel history.

Booking.com took the competition by storm. It kicked its rival companies out of the competition and changed the way consumers book hotels. The company started with setting the prices lower than their competitors which eventually helped them to gain a wide customer base. One of the most prominent features on the website was the search engine. The hotel search engine of the company is still compared to the websites that have emerged in recent times. Also, Booking.com looked out for the best online marketing by posting ads on Google and other internet websites. At the time, the concept of online marketing was less known which gave the company an advantage.

Another change that made people switch from Expedia and other hotel-booking websites, was the way customers pay for their hotels. Unlike Expedia, Booking.com allowed its customers to pay on the spot rather than prepaying months before their journey. The company started the new payment method in 2009, which tripled the bookings made on the site. It ensured its customers, ‘a top-quality service’, including offering 24/7 support to them. It attracted a large hotel database, due to the favourable commissions and great services, they gave to the hotels.

Another formula that they applied was showing the most recent booking and displaying the number of users currently viewing a hotel. The wildly successful “one room left” message is the signature technique that Booking.com uses to get its customers cash-in the booking as fast as possible. One of the major factors that made Booking.com successful was their conversion to an agency model from a merchant model. It allowed the company to ease out its operations and processes.

Since the merger of Active Hotels and Booking in 2006, Booking.com has been touching the heights of success. Booking.com is largely responsible for making Booking Holdings, a $100 Billion Dollar company. The website has massive 28,425,726 listings in 148,470 destinations from 228 countries. Each day, more than 1,550,000 rooms are reserved on the website. The site is available in 43 languages. It has been constantly perfecting its user experience displaying that in business, customer satisfaction means the most.

Airbnb Confirms its Plans to Buy Last-minute Hotel Booking App ‘HotelTonight’

In January, the Wall Street Journal had reported that Airbnb was planning to acquire the hotel-booking application HotelTonight, but the negotiations for the transaction had “gone cold”. But, on Thursday, the company confirmed in a statement, that it is going to acquire the last-minute hotel booking business HotelTonight.

airbnb
Image Source: abc.net

The HotelTonight is a hotel booking app that allows its users to find and book good and affordable hotels even at the last minute. The app is specially designed to help its partners to sell their unsold rooms, and similarly, it is beneficial for the people, too, who are always on the go or for the ones who are in the need of last-minute arrangements.

This acquisition will help the Airbnb users to easily book hotels for their immediate plans, and they will have the freedom to travel without months-long planning. HotelTonight, currently, is operating in America, Europe and Australia. It also offers great discounts to entice more users. The company was recently valued at $463 million in the private market.

After treehouses and the boutique hotels, this is another progressive step for Airbnb towards growth. Last year, with the introduction to boutique hotels, the company claimed to have gained raised profits, and with the success of the boutique hotels, even the company has doubled the number of those hotels.

Airbnb has not disclosed the terms and the sum of the deal. Also, even after the deal, HotelTonight will operate as a separate entity and will work collaboratively with the Airbnb President Greg Greeley.

“We started HotelTonight because we knew people wanted a better way to book an amazing hotel room on-demand, and we are excited to join forces with Airbnb to bring this service to guests around the world,” Sam Shank, co-founder and CEO of HotelTonight said in a statement. “Together, HotelTonight and Airbnb can give guests more choices and the world’s best boutique and independent hotels a genuine partner to connect them with those guests.

Airbnb has been working on expanding its services and acquiring other hotel booking services in order to grow bigger. Also, the start of the year for Airbnb was with the acquisition of Danish startup Guest. A platform which provides the facility to book venues for meetings and other work-related events.