
Ask HN: Rate My Startup - LetMeGo: Let lodgings bid for your stay - torrenegra
http://letmego.com
======
mattwdelong
I'm currently employed in the hotel industry. I really have no defined role,
but I perform a lot of the GM roles. I can give you a few things to think
about.

First and foremost, the chain to which we belong just got out of a long fight
with a large Online Travel Agency [OTA]. During this "fight", the chain really
noticed that OTA's had a stranglehold on the online room distributions,
especially the rates so in response, they have "initiated" some policies to
nip that in the butt. (OTA's are currently killing Vegas)

I will show you the breakdown of our reservation distribution this year: 55%
CHAINWEBSITE.com, 27% CHAIN Call Center, 9% GDS Travel Agencies, 9% Third
Party Websites (broken down into Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity). In short,
due to our policies we CANNOT offer a lower price outside of our best
available rate available on the CHAINWEBSITE.com - we could null our franchise
agreement.

I only speak for one chains policies, but this chain has 6k properties and
another 1k or so in development. It's not small.

Thats one thing to think about. Some more thoughts:

Getting GMs to lower rates is tough; if you give guest X rate Y, and guest Z
finds out, they also want rate Y. It sometimes makes a messy situation dealing
with this. Selling rooms in important, but keep rate integrity intact is also
important.

Chicken/Egg conundrum. How do you plan on getting hotels to participate?

\-- In response to the above, I would personally like to search my
geographical area for any travelers without having to sign the hotel up. Can I
do that? Why not?

Some solutions to the above thoughts:

Instead of getting hotels to directly negotiate prices, why not use a
combination of that and a GDS system like Amadeus, SABRE or Galileo. You know,
so if a hotel doesn't bid on their trip to offer occupancy, then they have the
option of making a booking through your system opposed defaulting to Expedia
(which books through the same systems). It might solve the intermittency
between the chicken/egg problem, and having an active user base - attracting
one before the other would be essential. Overall, I don't think the hotel
industry will take kindly to having to bid for guests. On the other hand,
there is LOTS of money to be had and I wish you the very best. Its an
ambitious start!

~~~
torrenegra
Thanks a lot for your feedback Matt. It is very interesting and valuable. I
can tell you know a lot about the industry and how it deals with OTAs.

First of all, LetMeGo is not only about low prices: it's about offers
customized for each traveler depending on his/her needs (VentureBeat nailed it
down here: <http://bit.ly/5vioZZ> ). Nevertheless, given that LetMeGo's
pricing is "semiopaque" (the bids submitted by the lodging are ONLY visible to
the traveler that submitted the itinerary), we think that some lodgings will
offer prices below what they publish in CHAINWEBSITE.COM. This would be
relatively similar to the way hotels do with other opaque-pricing service like
Priceline and Hotwire that allow them to forget about parity. Time will tell
if this assumption is correct.

By the way, we are not counting on large chains for our success. In fact, we
want to work primarily with independent and small hotels, bed and breakfasts,
and the large vacation rental market. Our system has been designed with them
in mind first. Why? Because this area of the industry has a lot of potential
that hasn't been discovered yet, and because I am against large corporations
with too much power.

In reference to the chicken/egg dilemma, we have secured access to large
databases of lodgings. We are inviting them all to list their lodgings for
free using a very intuitive interface. They will only pay us a 10% commission
per booking after they get paid.

We are staying away from the GDSs for now because most independent lodgings
don't use them (outside the US independent lodgings account for more than 80%
of the market). Also, because our service, as I mentioned above, is about
custom offers and service, and not only about real-time and the-lowest
pricing.

I had the "pleasure" of chatting with the VPs of Revenue Management of two of
the largest hotel chains in the US and in the world. As you predicted in your
comments, they didn't like LetMeGo's model. That, for me, was a good sign.

Thank you Matt!

~~~
mattwdelong
Glad I could help in some way. A few other thoughts I had after reading your
response.

First, don't let the VPs of Revenue Management make you deviate from targeting
chains. They have THEIR profits to account for, just like each hotel has their
own profits to account for. In a way, this scares them because the revenue is
not coming in through THEIR channels. If you think you can help a hotel in a
chain profit, if you can prove it with data and you're passionate about it
then go for them too! There are some really awesome online tools I want to
use, but there are just so many policies that don't allow it. Hotel industry
right now is stuck between being "innovative" and "head stuck in and around
the ass cheeks region". Simply put, the hotel industry is dropping the ball in
many areas where they can thrive. I would LOVE to work for a chic independent
hotel doing marketing, I think I know enough about the industry and online
marketing to help them immensely.

I am going to discuss it with the owner of the establishment I work at to
check out the site and see what they think. They are fairly old school in
their thinking and I am scared that they might fall behind. I have been trying
hard to be persuasive in transitioning them into online marketing. They might
be willing to test it out at their smaller property first and see how it goes.
I may get back in touch with you via email in the next couple days.

All I can tell you when negotiating with sales/gm/owner is put emphasis on
their value. They do want to fill a room, as a room is perishable just like a
food item. A room not sold is a room that can never be sold again. Just a
quick question with regards to bidding on a guest - does the hotelier see
other hoteliers bidding? Or is this private?

Regardless, I am very interested to see how your venture plays out. Again,
good luck!

~~~
torrenegra
Thank you Matt :)

Yes, lodgings see the bids from other lodgings in real time, including all the
details. Why?

------
torrenegra
LetMeGo is a new service that allows travelers to submit their itineraries so
that lodgings bid for their stays: <http://letmego.com>

LetMeGo is the result of the famous/infamous immersion discussed in here
"Results of: 7 developers, working 24/7 for 90 days, 1 house (in Colombia)"
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730031>

I know I don't participate a lot in HN. In part because I discovered you only
a few months ago and in part because I've quite busy getting LetMeGo ready for
launch. Anyway, I look forward for your feedback and to participate more and
more in here.

Thanks!

------
Lewisham
Not too impressed by being told Chrome isn't good enough for your site!

~~~
torrenegra
I guess you used Chrome for Mac, right? Chrome for Windows is working fine.
Maybe Chrome for Mac, too, but we haven't completed QA there yet. We will
complete it soon, though.

~~~
froggy
I get the warning with Chrome 4.0.249.64 on Windows.

------
andreshb
I absolutely love the intro videos, especially the one narrated by Obama and
Ozzy Osbourne

~~~
jellisjapan
I agree, but I couldn't help thinking that a Christopher Walken video would
really have sealed the deal for me.

------
Vindexus
I was confused by the video tour. I clicked watch video tour and was given the
option of who to narrate it. Unfortunately I didn't know what that was. I
thought I was looking at a rhetorical question along the lines of "you pick
your favorite music, so how do you pick your favorite lodging?" or something
like that. I'd suggest changing the heading of that to "Which narrator do you
want?" or something with the word narrator.

That was my only nitpick. I tried out the interface and I love it. This is a
really cool app that I find to be really well put together.. It does have the
Catch 22 of you need lodgings to get users and users to get lodgings.
Hopefully you find a way around that.

~~~
torrenegra
We will improve the interface for the video tours using the feedback you and
the others (below) have provided. Thank you!

------
felideon
I'd get rid of the yellow note at the bottom---at least from the home page.
You could handle uncaught exceptions and then display the note, for example,
or put it in the About Us page.

Us Colombians are too polite, so it would probably be OK to display upfront if
it was local. The Beta logo should be enough for most people. The note just
predisposes users to think something might go wrong.

~~~
torrenegra
Indeed. The objective is to under-promise and over-deliver ;)

------
drewdrewdrew
Looks good...but from a usability standpoint, would it kill you to label the
fields? Which one is start date, which one is end date. What about i18n?
"Where are you going?" is a little too ambiguous I think. I presume that's
what you were going for, but locality can be quite granular. Hopefully there
is an intuitive interpreter parsing that text.

~~~
torrenegra
Hmmmm... Good point. In fact, there in interpreter for that, but you've got a
good point. We will try to make it easier to understand. Thanks Drew!

------
drhodes
The layout reminds me of the food pyramid ->
[http://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-
public/documents/image/...](http://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-
public/documents/image/ucm070186.gif) (Not a bad thing!) except the style of
the layers is not consistent. Applying some color theory would certainly help.
There seems to be ~9 different fonts on the front page. As for the concept of
the site: the notion of inverting the business model is really neat, I hope it
succeeds.

~~~
torrenegra
We will definitely reduce the number of fonts. And I though we had the number
of fonts under control! I forgot to check the home page, though :S Thanks for
noticing it!

------
thinkbohemian
I really liked in the video that you could skip ahead to different parts. What
did you use to do that?

I liked the videos, and thought the different voices was an interesting
gimmick, though I personally would load a video as soon as the user clicked
the first link, and while it is loading give them the option to switch between
voices. How many people click the first link without clicking to watch the
video?

~~~
torrenegra
Thank you! It is a feature of FlowPlayer.

We will improve the home page so that one of the videos plays back
automatically. Thanks for the idea.

~~~
thinkbohemian
Cool, but don't just take my word for it set up an A/B test, there are many
great ideas friends have suggested, that the internet at large was not too
thrilled about.

------
JangoSteve
Looks really good, great design. A couple minor specific notes...

-"Lodgings" is an awkward word to use in the main description. I agree that it is the most accurate word to use, but I think few people think of the term "lodgings" when looking for hotels.

-Your "How it works" section looks cool, but it's an image. No text. That's not very semantic. It also means I can't copy and paste the description to tell a friend.

~~~
torrenegra
Thank you Steve. You are right. We have had several hours of discussions in
reference to the proper word to use ("lodging" or any other) and we have not
been able to come up with a definite solution.

We will change the "How It Works" area today as per your suggestion. Thanks!

~~~
JangoSteve
My vote would go for something like "accommodations". I think it's a little
more mainstream.

------
tyohn
I love this idea. I'll try it out on my next trip. I love the videos they're
awesome - although since your site looks AJAX-ie you might want to consider
opening the videos in a "lightbox" popup - I tried several times to find the
close button on the first video I opened - because I didn't realize it open a
new page ...or you can just sum it up to my stupidity :p

~~~
torrenegra
Thank you Tyohn. We decided to go with separate URLs for better SEO, but we
will try to make it clearer for visitors :)

------
noodle
my thoughts:

too many options for the video tour. i mean, i didn't have a problem figuring
it out, and i enjoyed what i saw, but you're going to find that some users
will get confused. from the standpoint of converting customers, provide a
default and start it playing, and then provide other options if they want to
get silly.

i'm not sure how i feel about the red box on the map. i kind of think that it
should be a bit more static, so that it doesn't automatically re-search each
time the zoom changes or i scroll the map. but i can't think of a good
solution off the top of my head.

there are a few references to st.hal.biz, where its clear that it should be
just hal.biz. example: <http://st.hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif> is
showing up as a broken image vs <http://hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif>

~~~
andreshb
I agree. I would suggest having one of them already opened, with tabs for the
rest.

~~~
torrenegra
Great ideas for the videos! Thank you. We will try to implement them ASAP.

------
theycallmemorty
Looks pretty cool.

When I was on the 'iternerary' view the bar at the top of the screen changing
colors drove me crazy though.

~~~
torrenegra
Thank you! Would you mind sharing the link with me? I am not sure to which
interface you were referring to.

~~~
theycallmemorty
[http://letmego.com/submit/toronto?G_type=AREA&check_in=2...](http://letmego.com/submit/toronto?G_type=AREA&check_in=2010-02-12%2003%3A00%20PM&check_out=2010-02-15%2011%3A00%20AM)

Just change any of the options on the side and you'll see what I mean.

~~~
torrenegra
I see. You are right. It may become annoying. Thank you for the tip. We will
work on it!

------
eraad
I`m using Chrome/Ubuntu 9.10 and got the warning message. Everything worked
fine though.

After selecting my travel dates, I got the impression that the whole page
would scroll down, not just the left column. It was a bit confusing I think.

I´m not a fan of nesting scroll bars.

I will test the service out for real in a couple of months.

------
pbz
I won't repeat what others said above, but I will add that I feel the home
page is too gray / dark. The "search" page has a better color balance than the
homepage. The way it is now it's rather depressing, and less inviting. Pretty
nice otherwise.

------
jselzer
Are you able to share what strategies you have for increasing participation
among lodgings businesses? It seems to me that this would be a big challenge
and a huge factor in your success, and I am curious how you address it.

~~~
torrenegra
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066008>

------
pedalpete
great idea and great execution (from what I can see). The narration idea is
very original with the video intro. But I do agree with other commenter that
it was odd to have to pick a narration. I'd suggest you pick the one you like
best or which best shows off the capabilities, and just use that, or rotate
through them. Even though you went through the effort to create the different
videos, it is best to keep something like that simple for the user.

------
toptrader
Where did you get all of the hotel data (rating, amenities, types, of rooms,
pictures, etc.)? Are the hotels that sign up required to submit that
information?

~~~
torrenegra
Yes. They are required to sign up and provide all the info.

------
jparicka
Cool looking site .. but where did you get the voice from?

~~~
torrenegra
My other startup: <http://voice123.com>

------
grandalf
Great idea. I will use it next time I travel and if I get a great deal I'll be
a loyal customer.

------
zasz
Damn. I was hoping you were making an app to let landlords bid on desirable
tenants.

