

Roomblocker (YC S15) is modernizing hotel booking for groups - meghani
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/06/roomblocker-yc-s15-is-modernizing-group-hotel-reservations/

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

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

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coldcode
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.

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davecyen
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.

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SD1983
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?

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davecyen
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.

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nyc973
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.

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davecyen
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!

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spdustin
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?

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davecyen
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.

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woah
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.

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davecyen
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.

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

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

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orthoganol
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.

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davecyen
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

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orthoganol
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.

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davecyen
Great advice and appreciate it!

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orthoganol
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).

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davecyen
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!

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

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davecyen
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.

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

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davecyen
Thanks for the kind words!

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julee04
congrats dave!!!

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davecyen
Thanks Ju!

