Frustrated by the countless unstructured lists of hotels online, Top10.com's founders decided they could do it faster and in a more personalised way than what already exists.
The idea is to take users to the best hotel for them at the best price via a personalised shortlist by crunching "huge amounts of data to narrow" down the hotels in a location to the 10 best for a particular customer.
The London-based startup also compares prices from all the major OTAs to ensure it is always displaying the best price available.
The founding team includes CEO Tom Leathes, CMO Alex Buttle and CPO Harry Jones who have worked together previously across telecoms, commercial property, insurance and finance. The founders are joined by a team of engineers, developers, designers and marketers.
Top10 has venture capital backing from investors including Accel Partners, Founder Collective and Idealab.
The company says the online hotel booking market was worth about $100 billion last year but with only about half of all travel reservations made online, it anticipates huge room for growth particularly in light of mobile trends.
Top10 does not see itself as pure metasearch and says its platform is about finding the perfect hotel at the best price but it does acknowledge competition from the likes of Trivago, Kayak and Skyscanner as well as travel inspiration sites, review services and OTAs.
The revenue model is based on commission which the company says makes it work harder for consumers.
"We only get paid if a consumer clicks off our site on the right hotel deal and then books. This has pushed us really hard to build great hotel matching technology and an algorithm that works seamlessly.
"Long term success will come from scale and repeat use - this means giving a first class experience on any device in any territory - and doing innovative things that our larger competitors cannot."
Q&A with Alex Buttle, co-founder and chief marketing officer
What problem does the business solve?
The average hotel booking is the result of more than 12 website visits before the customer finds the right hotel - this is a huge problem, because it’s an arduous process. This is a particularly big issue on mobile devices, where jumping around between tabs, websites and apps just doesn’t make sense. We’re solving this by providing fast, personalised, trusted results in a single, streamlined format that saves people time and effort.
Clearly, the big challenge is to make sure our Top10 results are right every time - that’s going to need much more work on our personalisation technology, but this is getting faster and smarter every day.
Most hotel booking platforms are not personal, seamless and ultra-easy to use - we want to solve that problem by building a platform that is.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
We only started the first beta in early 2013 - there’s been no big pivot as we’re getting fantastic traction already, but we are constantly evolving the platform and making big leaps in the technology and user experience all the time.
Why should people or companies use the business?
If anyone is looking to find the right hotel at the best price without spending hours filtering thousands of badly suited options, they should give Top10 a try.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
Real growth will only come if people enjoy using Top10 and get great results every time. That means we need to build great products that people love using - we think that’s the most powerful marketing strategy there is.
That said, we’ll be marketing aggressively online and off next year through search, display, email and social. We have a great product and we want to tell people about it.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In three years time, we will have a global proposition - multi-currency, multilingual and heavily optimised to any device. The challenge will be scaling - growing the team and opening up new offices and territories, but we’re building our product to work globally and in any market. A personalised hotel booking experience where you can save money will translate well in any country.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
Finding your perfect hotel at the best price is just not as easy as it should be - most of the time, the experience isn’t personal enough and it’s easy to get bewildered by the number of options.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
We admire all user-centric tech companies that thrive in a culture of innovation and disruption. Google, Apple and Spotify are three amazing companies which have pushed the boundaries of both product and scale - we hope to do the same.
Tnooz view:
This is the kind of idea most people will probably have a play with. Not only does it claim to personalise a shortlist to you but get you the cheapest price - no mean feat.
However, it's going to have to be pretty smart, pretty quickly to keep users engaged and coming back for more, hence why so much hangs on the personalisation technology.
Competition is fierce as the newbie points out - everyone from metasearch to travel inspiration to OTA and we know many of these players are also experimenting with different personalisation techniques. We can probably add the likes of Facebook and Google to the list of rivals given development going on around the social graph.
All of that said, the idea of having a top 10 list is good, it starts you off with something palatable as opposed to the reams of listings you get now.
If it cracks the technology you could easily see Top10 as an acquisition target and it could also build up business by white-labeling its service to other businesses. There's probably some way to go before any of that however.
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