Online Hotel Reservations Hotel Bookings

Who – or what - exactly is it that determines the best website for online hotel reservations? Isn’t it the user who decides? Those actually booking accommodation online? Doesn’t it stand to reason, then, that a user is the best source of information to help improve a website, and is a website’s most influential critic?

We do not only appreciate input, we actively seek it. A user’s participation is vital in this project, and we cannot be the best without your say. We want you to give us feedback so that we can develop the website that you, the user, want to use to book online hotel reservations. Tell us about other websites you’ve booked accommodation from, and what you thought about them. The good, the bad, and the downright ugly – we want to know about all of them!

The site which we are developing at the moment is aiming at business travellers as main market. We will offer more then 70.000 Hotels worldwide with a focus on City Hotels. The site will offer additional relevant content and offers such as: recommended restaurants, theatre ticket reservation, car rentals and local exhibitions.

Most importantly we will have a login section for companies where they can plan and organize their business travels with us. A telephone hotline for companies completes the service

We seek comment on:

1. What experiences do you have with other hotel booking sites (good or bad)
2. What do you expect from a good hotel booking site.
3. What makes you decide which portal to use
4. What special requirements do business travellers have
5. What features would a company like to see on such service

We also appreciate comment from online travel professionals, internet marketers and web developers.

We can only build the best website for online hotel reservations with your help, so put pen to paper – or, more specifically, fingers to keyboards! If you need a little gentle persuasion, there’s even a prize for the best suggestion! And who doesn’t like a freebie?

Thank you in advance

Wolfgang Brand

This is the first idea of how the site might look…

DESIGN

Are you sitting inside staring at the rain, wishing and hoping that you could be somewhere else (anywhere else!) but home? Well now you can, with Clever Hotel Reservations. Poised to become the web’s leading hotel reservation website, it couldn’t be easier to escape the daily grind. One click of the mouse, and you’re away!

Clever Hotel Reservations specialise in quality hotel accommodation at discounted rates, perfect for that naughty weekend away with your partner, or that family holiday in the sun you’ve been planning for ages but never get seem to take. Drop what you’re doing, pack your suitcase, and see what hotels we’ve got to put that smile back on your face and restore your fading tan.

We have over 70,000 hotels worldwide listed on our database, ranging from sleek city centre hotels to quaint, boutique-style seaside resorts. You can choose from convenient airport stopover hotels and two-and three-star budget hotel rooms, to gorgeous four-and five-star luxury resorts fit for a king.

Please note: What you are looking at is not the final website. This is a scaled-down, temporary website we are running while we work on the final, much-improved one. So check back often. The database and reservation system are both fully functional, however, and you may browse for accommodation and make your booking with complete peace of mind. Transhotels - the prestigious Madrid-based company behind the database system – has years of experience in the industry, and supplies online reservation solutions to some of Europe’s best hotel booking agencies.

While we’re in the process of developing our final website, we encourage you to leave feedback in our online blog. Tell us what features you’d expect from an online hotel reservation service, how important a booking hotline is, what experiences you’ve had from other similar sites (both good and bad!) and, finally, what makes you use one travel website but not another? By collating this information, we aim to develop a website that is highly functional from the beginning, meaning a more effective system is in place for you, the user.

Sincerely

Wolfgang Brand

By setting up Clever Bookings we set ourselves an incredible challenge, and have put ourselves in direct competition with the likes of expedia.com, hotels.com, and hotelpronto.com. Some have called it insane, others have called it brave, but we like to think of it as self-confident. We realise that we won’t be able to compete with the big boys overnight, but we’ve established a one-year, two-year, and five-year business plan that should help us get somewhere close.

To achieve this, we will rely predominantly on search engine traffic, as we dont have massiv advertising budgets as yet . We already know that there is a high demand for Internet hotel reservation websites. That was the easy part. We analysed what exactly people were searching for when looking to book a hotel online. Can you guess what the top key words and phrases people type into search engines such as Google are?

We have a complete list, including an estimation of how much traffic each key word and phrase generates per day.

Naturally, we won’t target all of these key words and phrases. Instead, we will choose those that appear in combinations and are more specific to Europe. You may have noticed that words like ‘online’, ‘reservations’ and cheap’ - combined with city names like London, Paris, or Barcelona - appear often. These will be our main targets.

Our aim for the first year is to secure 2,000 hotel reservations per month, and this will be the same for our second year. The next stage of our business plan will be to secure more bookings than hotelpronto.com, which is generating 12,000 bookings per month on average. More impressively, 12,000 bookings per month generate 4,400,000 euros per month. Something we wouldn’t mind matching, either!

Wolfgang Brand