What do you think of starting Hotel booking site (like hotels.com , agoda.com ) ? How to compete and make good money when there are so many big players in the market like hotels.com agoda.com expedia etc). ? Is there space for more hotel booking sites?
You must have some money behind you to pay for advertising. takes a lot of traffic to become profitable.
I think this can become an interesting discussion. What is important when you try to get into a competitive market like the one with hotel booking, is that you need to stand out. Some sites are unique because they offer you the chance to book the hotel in advance and then pay when you actually visit the hotel instead of paying in advance. @tradester have you thought about how you can add value to the market with your own hotel booking site?
The actual question that you need to ask is whether there is a NEED for another hotel booking site. What can you offer with your site that the other hotel booking sites don't offer? Businesses that succeed find ways to be different than the competition -- to offer different services. You have to find a need that hotel seekers have, and solve that need better than your competitors. This is how you find success in any business.
You could focus on smaller hotels who do not have their own websites, and set them up with a co-branded site and domain - then essentially they'd be advertising for you.
I like what this guy said. Is there a need for yet another? We already have successful monster sites doing this... and we have medium sized successful sites doing this.... and we have less than successful smaller sites doing this..... do we need another site to do exactly what all of these are doing? Sorry I don't see the need.
@NetStar has described the situation pretty well. What I also see (here in the U.S) are large amounts of money being spent on TV ads by some of the bigger players (e.g., hotels.com, trivago.com, etc.) and that tells me that it is a very saturated market that is causing these folks to spend significant money in a desperate attempt to get visitors/revenues. Add to that the whole airbnb thing and you have a saturated market being disrupted by an approach similar to what uber did to the taxi industry. It's ugly and I suggest you find something else to focus on.
It's a big task to become like the big players. When your business is similar to other successful ones you have to be able to offer your customers more value so you create the need to use your site instead of the others. So I would start to email these websites and find out what they charge for listing hotels or getting a booking to see if you can offer the hotels more value. I would say the only value these websites offer hotels is views and possible bookings and high search engine listing if they are major players. Don't forget you can make it from targeting Something people already do you don't have to try and make unique Idea to become successful. And remember chase your customers needs before you chase your urge to make money that will come Latter.
It is really the best idea because think and look the hotels near to you, Do you think all hotels are at these websites? No! So become smart and enjoy this challenge because It is right time to start website like this.. but dont completely rely on it.. Do something along with it... No need to spend huge money, Only a little brain require and everything goes fine.
This is kind of off topic from hotel, but I do have quite a few vacation home in our local area, currently I put our properties on big OTAs site our occupancy rate is above average, since we only started about a year. For the past 2 months I have launch our direct website but there is still no potential direct guests booking with us yet. My question is how hard its could be to get direct booking from potential guests who also book with OTAs site (such as airbnb, homeaway etc).
I just used AirBnB for a vacation. The fact that they have reviews of the various options made a big difference for us. There was also presumed safety in having AirBnB handle the financial transaction. Not sure that I would book direct with anything other than an established hotel chain that I recognize. Beyond that, you have to have solid search engine ranking to even show up in this crowded market. My feeling is that you have a tough road to haul to get direct bookings.
everything is have chance to be a success business. you will get what you want with luck and hard work.
I think its great Idea to open a Hotel website and you are right that there lot of competitors in the market and all.So First You should look at the work of the competitors of what they have and what they not have and ask the feedback of there user what they don't like about the hotel website and you use those things in your website what user wants