HotelTonight now lets hotels show cheaper rates only to particular guests, as determined by their mobile device's signal.
The pioneer last-minute hotel booking startup said today it has added two tools--Bonus Rate and Rate Drop--that pushes deals to only subsets of users, depending on the location of their devices.
It's a fresh twist on segmenting the market to show different prices to different customers to achieve incremental revenue.
Tool #1: If you're within a few miles of a hotel after three o'clock on the day of arrival, you may see additional discounts of between 10% and 40% off of their standard HotelTonight rate, if the hotel chooses to take advantage of the new Rate Drop tool -- available as of today worldwide.
Tool #2: If you are hundreds of miles away from a destination and would require advance planning and a larger budget to travel, you may see a deeper discount for a property than users in the same city as the property would see, if a hotel takes advantage of the new Bonus Rate feature -- which is being rolled out globally during the next few weeks.
Says CEO Sam Shank:
These two features aim to motivate customers by price. And price then serves to raise the hotels in their rankings on HotelTonight and allows the startup to merchandize the other features of the hotel.
It's partly made possible by the recent breakdown in hotel rate parity, and it and may breathe fresh life into hotel marketing as other companies copy the model.
CEO's blueprints
How did CEO Sam Shank's team successfully build HotelTonight in such a short time? That question was answered by Shank himself in an hourlong video talk last week at Launch Incubator.