Reach.ly Connects Hotels With Travellers Through Twitter
Customers today have an increasing number of ways to interact with brands or physical venues. They can participate in online communities in social media, voice their feedback on Twitter, check-in almost anywhere and benefit from discounted coupons. There is also a growing number of companies that help traditional industries and physical venues interact with their customers. The latest example from this region is Reach.ly, a Latvian start-up that has just launched a service for hotels to reach out to potential customers through Twitter. Their idea is fairly simple: tweets about travel are one of the top themes on Twitter; by capturing specific tweets that feature a town of destination and delivering them in a real-time stream to hotels Reach.ly help hotel administration easily reach out to prospective customers.
Ecompter: What Gets Measured, Gets Done
Ecompter is a start-up which offers a new service to the hospitality industry in these times of climate change. While every major airline has a carbon footprint calculator on their website, for hotels and the hospitality industry such measures are currently still of little concern. Ecompter is setting out to change this, and aims to help hotels measure their exact carbon footprint.
Selecting Your Hotel Just Got Easier
Ted Valentin, Swedish serial web entrepreneur, has lately been buy building a map mashup empire. Ted disclosed his maps gather 100'000 to 150'000 unique visitors per week at the moment, and growing. That is a great accomplishment considering all services are still mainly targeted for Swedish users.
Ted's latest service is a hotel map, hotellkartan.se. It essentially aggregates the global hotel infromation from (currently) three services, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia.com. It shows the hotels geographically on top of Google Maps, so that one is able to visually browse the hotels.
The great thing about the service is that you can search for the hotels in a variety of different ways. You can search alphabetically, by rating, by distance from a certain map point, by price - or the cheapest hotel within 1000 m from London Paddington station, for example. In my opinion, this makes it one of the most useful mashups I have ever run across. Having spent much too long a time lately looking for the perfect hotel trying to optimize location and distance along with price and hotel selections from different services, I just love this elegant solution to the problem.
BuzzPal Revealing Its Product
The mysterious Sweden/US based startup BuzzPal has revealed us what they are all about. As the founder, Chris Comella, says in the video, BuzzPal is an advanced version of CouchSurfing with a business model and growth strategy and it seems they are going head to head with a US based startup AirBed&Breakfast.
BuzzPal aims to facilitate people to find affordable accommodation on their travels from locals living in the given destination by enabling the locals to post their offer online with a price tag, be it an available couch, bed or even a flat for a few nights. In effect BuzzPal is an online marketplace for peer-to-peer traveling.
Chris didn't want to say exactly how they aim to monetize the service just yet. Whether they use the same model as AirBed&Breakfast which charges a 5-12% service fee from the guest during the checkout process or use for example an advertising based business model to go with the transactional one.
Even though AirBed&Breakfast is already up and running (unlike BuzzPal) BuzzPal has still a good shot at the market. AirBed&Breakfast had less than $20,000 in seed capital from friends and family when it started and has only just started gathering users: For example, when I checked they only had two places posted in Finland, five places in Denmark, four places in Sweden, none in Norway, Iceland or any of the Baltic countries. Out of these, the places on offer in say Denmark were all more expensive than for example Hotel Cabin City which is a decent choice right downtown Copenhagen.
