Hot Hotels are one of the start-ups that attended the recent Dublin Web Summit. I spoke to Conor O´Connor, CEO of Hot Hotels to find out more about the company.
Thank you for speaking with Entrepreneur Country Conor. Tell me about Hot?
Conor: Hi Kelly. Hot.co.uk is a Smartfone App to make same day hotel reservations. As we are mobile only, hotels can give us prices that are not available on the web or as a walk in.
So how does it work?
First you have to download Hot Hotels App, which you can do from the Apple App Store, Google Play for Android or at the App World for Blackberry. When you enter the App, pick a country, followed by a city and you will be given a list of hotels which have availability for that night and the rate on offer. We use different names to categorise these hotels such as Fashion, Basic, Rural, Historic and Luxury. The first time you use the service, you have to input credit card details but after that you can book a room in about 10 seconds.
How have hotels reacted to you?
Brilliantly. Their primary channel remains through the internet and tour operators but this opens a new channel for them, which we call the “impulse booker”. This is someone whose plans change unexpectedly and they need a place to stay at short notice. Hotels know if they can attract this person and provide them with a good experience, then the person will come back next time (and at the conventional rate).
How did you get into this?
I have spent all my working life setting up internet businesses or one form or another, especially in the tourism sector such as hoteles.es and Mydestinationinfo.com. Mobile is the next frontier and so the only way to properly understand what is happening is to set up a company. Also as someone who books hotels, I´d seen some of the solutions currently in the market and wondered if I could do better.
And how is it going so far?
Our App came out in Spain back in March and we quickly got to 50,000 downloads. We are now in 18 countries and 110 cities including places like Turkey, Morocco and Greece as well as in the UK, Ireland, Spain, France and Italy, which are our core markets. The plan is to keep expanding. What we do is very understandable, serves a real need and scales very well.
Competition?
The big one is Hotel Tonight who were founded in San Francisco but now have a Managing Director for Europe based in London. We met her in Madrid and we also met Sam Shank, the CEO here in Dublin. I always think it´s important to have a open line of communication with your competitors. Our common enemy is irrelevance, not each other. I´d rather someone books with Hotel Tonight than not at all. In the future, if both of us get big, it might not be so cosy but for the moment we are better paying attention to customers than slagging off each other.
And how are you different?
Well, having been dealing both with hotels and technology since 1999, I´ve a much better antennae for what to do and what not to do. There are people I´ve met on the way up that are now in senior positions in both hotel and travel companies. I did our biggest partnership deal in a 5 minute phone call. He knew me well enough to say yes immediately and because I had a reputation to uphold within the European travel industry he knew I wasn’t going to do anything half arsed.
What do you mean by European travel industry?
As Arnaud Bertrand of HouseTrip said recently "Travel is in our DNA in Europe, We invented the Hospitality industry.” It´s something you notice a lot in Spain, where I live. Tourism is treated as a really important industry. Europeans may be insecure about how good we are at other things but in leisure, there is a belief we can compete with anyone. Many hotels managers have told me they are pleased someone from Europe is doing this, not that that will matter if we don´t do a good job.
How are you funding the company?
We´re bootstrapping. The best way to keep your costs low is to spend your own money. So Hot is 100% owned and managed by the company´s founders. Also, the more traction we can demonstrate, the better the valuation. We have talked to a number of VCs mainly to get their feedback, but I know from experience that taking any outside money changes things day-to-day bigtime. We´ll hold off until we are ready to really scale.
Where do you see Hot in 18 months?
Well clearly, there has to be something beyond just booking. We have built quite a sophisticated back end (the app you see is only about 20% of the codebase) so that we can do a lot of analytics once we have enough data. That´s in the future though, for now we need to made sure every customer who books has a good experience and we start to see repeat business and word of mouth recommendation.
What has been your biggest problem so far?
One thing is that at start-up events, people confuse me with Simon Devonshire, who is the Director of Wayra Europe, the Telefonica Incubator. Admittedly our mothers probably couldn’t tell us apart!
Kelly Dolan
Kelly Dolan joined Entrepreneur Country in January 2012 as Head of Content. Her current responsibilities include managing Entrepreneur Country’s host of media platforms, including creating a weekly newsletter for investors and entrepreneurs, designing and editing a monthly digital magazine as well as managing an inventory of 200 leading entrepreneurial contributors, who share their business insights with Entrepreneur Country readers through it’s various communication channels. Kelly has also worked on account management, business development and sales, as well as strengthened engagement and increased the population of the Entrepreneur Country community.
Prior to joining Entrepreneur Country Kelly worked as a freelance journalist for Bauer Media on a range of men’s and women’s titles during crucial periods of digital transformation. Kelly also speaks at young entrepreneurial programmes, workshops and business schools, as well as sits on panels for industry events.
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