HotelPeeps is a Romania-based hotel search and booking service with a social twist, which first featured on Tnooz in July 2010 [TLabs Showcase - HotelPeeps].
So what happened in the intervening 12 months?
Are you making money yet?
To our immense satisfaction, yes. More than that, we started to make money in the first month after launching HotelPeeps.com as a booking website in late August 2011.
We had over Euro 10,000 in orders placed on the website in the very first month, despite the soft launch, and the trend is definitely positive.
What has been the biggest problem - building the product/service or marketing it to consumers/travel industry?
Since we started with a Facebook application only, we focused on gaining more users, then we tried to generate conversions (bookings). While growing the user base was happening at a good speed, with great user engagement, we failed to produce a reasonable number of bookings.
So the biggest problem was to generate orders out of Facebook traffic: while people spent a lot of time in the application, they did not place orders.
Biggest assumption in the business plan that was wrong?
We assumed that by having a solid user base and great user engagement we will also get orders out of a Facebook application. That was clearly wrong as Facebook traffic was not in buying-mode at all.
Is your current customer base as predicted?
When we last talked we had 5,000 users and we aimed for 50,000 by July 2011 – for our Facebook app. When we realized that growing this user base does not directly correlate with revenues, we moved to launching a booking website and did not actively promote the FB app anymore.
Right now we have around 20.000 users in Facebook, and even if we do not require users to open an account to make a booking using HotelPeeps.com, the Facebook engagement has picked up again.
So far users have reported (Facebook) their stay at around 3,000 hotels and added close to 1,000 destinations on their wish list. Over 5,000 people have subscribed to our deal alerts since we launched the HotelPeeps.com booking website and placed hundreds of orders so far.
Did you achieve your 12 month goals? If not, why not?
No. We stopped promoting our Facebook app when we were close to half the target, as it was obvious our initial assumption was wrong.
Has the problem you were trying to solve changed?
No, people still want to travel and want to get maximum quality services for their budget, or they want to save costs on their trips. We are able to spot special deals close to 70% compared to market average and this feature is very appreciated by our users and customers.
Which startup that has launched in the past 12 months did you think "Ah, wish we had done that!"?
No particular start-up. The big players have moved in the social space, creating similar Facebook applications, some other social-oriented hotel start-ups have emerged but we still seem to be the only ones crunching future real prices and looking for special deals.
If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?
Don’t follow the hype, focus on understanding customer behaviour instead.
NB: Tnooz launched TLab Showcase in March 2010, a dedicated channel to give startups in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector an opportunity to explain their vision, company background and strategy to a wider audience.
As well as publishing an elevator pitch-type questionnaire for each business, Tnooz committed to following up with each startup after 12 months or so to see how well (or not) each performed.
NB2: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.