TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Canada-based hotel search service Bedmap.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
I am James Lavigne, engineer and entrepreneur. In my ongoing effort to avoid formal employment I work on web development projects, and at my own consulting business focused on navigation technology R&D for the mining industry.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Bedmap is entirely self-funded as of now. We have not been actively seeking funding, but if the right offer were to come along we would be open to entertaining it.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Online hotel search. This is an old problem that has been solved before but there's huge and obvious room for improvement.
Most online hotel bookings happen on a few large sites which are all very similar.
You ask for a room in a certain place at a certain time and you get back this list of hotels. But the list isn't tailored to help you spot a deal, it's stacked the other way: you appear to have a few choices but really the promoted or high-priced options are the most prominent and you're constantly being upsold -- people don't like that.
As a user you don't really have a good medium for comparison, and using a map as the display medium in this case tends to create a more even playing field.
A good deal here is much more obvious than it is using a more "conventional" search method, especially in unfamiliar places.
There's no way to promote your particular hotel on bedmap other than to offer a better rate or better value, and that's the sort of competition that benefits consumers.
Describe the business, core products and services?
The core product is a hotel search service based on a large interactive map.
We often describe it as "search" but we might more accurately call it a "browse service" because that's what makes it unique.
Users enter a search term indicating where they'd like to go, and we show them a big map of available hotels in the area.
Nightly rates are prominently displayed and categorized as "cheap" or "expensive" compared to other hotels nearby. It's fast and easy to filter the results based on your requirements, too: if you're only interested in places with free WiFi, for example, we'll show you a map of just those places.
From here it's up to you: if you have a location in mind, zoom in and see what's available there. If you're less picky, zoom out and see what's available in the surrounding areas.
We load hotels seamlessly as you explore new areas, and of course we show live prices and availability. We continue to focus on making our interface fast, uncluttered and usable, avoiding gimmicky features and unnecessary information.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Hotels are available worldwide. Our customers so far are generally tech-aware Europeans and North Americans interested in short-term hotel stays.
The challenge will be to grab the attention of the more “mainstream” audience that is less interested in travel tech itself than in the results it provides.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We have customers but we don't have investors, so I guess that means yes!
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
We use partners to provide both our hotel inventory and secure booking services. Revenue is in the form of commissions for the time being. In the future we may look at other options.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- An uncluttered interface designed to help you browse and compare.
Weaknesses:
- Relative lack of design/marketing experience, and a definite lack of time needed to implement our ideas.
Opportunities:
- A large and innovation-starved market.
Threats:
- Strong and deep-pocketed competition.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?We get a small but constant stream of "this is not an original idea" comments when soliciting feedback.
Obviously we are not the first to do hotel reservations. It's my personal opinion that in some cases ideas are a dime a dozen and that the real advantage is to be had in the implementation.
We don't listen to them because the amount of positive feedback we get is far greater.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
Users - make them happy and everything else will follow. Bedmap as a project has only existed for four months and been online for one, so 12 months is a long time! With the ideas we have in store, the project could look significantly different by then.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.