Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party - Have A Raving Christmas
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Source: Guillaume Thevenot

When we arrived at the reception in the
afternoon, we were welcomed by one of the front desk people asking us to fill
some information about what we wanted to do during our stay. This is to
understand what sort of activities you would be interested in. There were plenty
of activities to choose from at the hotel (trekking, tour, massage, cooking
lessons and so on). 

Our hotel room was a deluxe and we
benefited from an upgrade, meaning we were on the ground floor with a private
terrace and shower outside with a little closed garden. The room is very nice
and simple. You can retrieve some elements of the Chedi hotel chain to which
this property belonged to in the past (the hotel became Alila in XXX)

Now, what about service? Having stayed in a
couple of Chedi properties before, I was expecting the same kind of service at
the Alila even though it changed ownership.

Big, big, big mistake.!

 
On the first evening, we decided to go to
the hotel restaurant where we were given a table closed to the kitchen. We were
told because we didn’t make any reservation, that was the only table left.
Actually, the problem was the nice tables outside looking over the fantastic
scenery were actually booked for a reception / party. We also found one of the waiters
quite lunatic and felt she did not really pay attention to us. 

Another big surprise was that the hotel has
groups during our entire stay. Call me snobbish but I don’t think hotels should
mix honeymooners, couples with groups. Especially when you spend £100 a night.

Every morning was a disaster in terms of
getting your breakfast. There is no buffet, probably because of the heat
outside. So you have to order your breakfast every morning when you arrive at
your table. One morning when were going for an early excursion, we waited 30
min to get 2 orange juice and some hot plate. I was basically fuming inside my
head. All the attention was given towards this group of 20 or so people.
Individual were simply left out. We didn’t even see the hotel manager. God
knows if he was there during the 3 days we were staying at the Alila.

My advice is to avoid the hotel if you are
not part of a group and opt in for hotels that care about service and give you
attention.
 

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

I remember this company very well. I was finishing my studies at IMHI/Essec Business school in 1999-2000, and I attended a conference at our school (I believe it was the IHRA conference). One of the speaker was from WorldRes (can't remember who it was) and was explaining how the Internet changed the dynamics of reaching people in the hotel world. And also how hotel bookings were migrating from phone towards online.

WorldRes was born and everyone thought it was simply THE dogs bollocks online hotel company. For whatever reasons (bad decisions, bad strange management, difficulties to manage costs…), the company didn't survive the Internet crash in 2001 and was literally loosing millions of dollars. I don't even remember it that company ever made a profit in any quarter. The planned IPO never happened and investors in the company started to worry.
WorldRes was beaten by bigger and clever companies such as Expedia, Lastminute, Travelocity and more importantly was loosing against new entrants in the online hotel space like ActiveHotels, Booking.com, HRS and of course Hotels.com.

After a lot changes in the management and subsequent redundancies (local offices were closed i heard), 2003 saw the renaissance of WorldRes as a joint venture with 3 leading hotel chains:
- Accor who already invested in the company back in 2000
- Six Continents (now known as Intercontinental Hotel Group with brands like Holiday Inn)
- Hilton International (Hilton Europe was a separate company from Hilton Corporation in the US)

I quote the former CEO of Accor "We have been a WorldRes partner and investor since 2000. They continue
to interface with our central reservation system, thus using the best
technology for selling our hotels online. We have agreed to invest and promote WorldRes Europe as
the optimal means to find and book our hotels online. WorldRes Europe
will make our hotel brands available to anyone with online access,
including Web sites, call centers, tour operators and travel agents."

This sounds as a great idea but as we know it, a joint venture made with your competitors cannot always work (Andbook.com for instance was another failure on its own for example) and most of the time can go terribly wrong. A few years went by…

In 2005, when everybody forgot about WorldRes and thought the website was well buried, we hear that an Irish company Web Reservations International (WRI) buys WorldRes for an undisclosed sum. CEO and founder of WRI Ray Nolan says: "WRI has built a successful
and profitable budget accommodation business, and
this acquisition will significantly broaden our
operations. We look forward to applying our unique
business model to the global hotel market. We believe
our emphasis on value and clarity will be highly
attractive to existing WorldRes hotels and anticipate
growing the WorldRes business as a part of WRI." 

So I believe WRI saw some great potential to make WorldRes profitable and bring more distribution partners. This sounded like a big challenge for the Irish company knowing that after 10 years of of Operations, WorldRes was still struggling to achieve profitability and also hardly raised their profile in the online travel space. Yes the inventory was there (30,000 hotels at that time before the acquisition) but what about consumers? How come other local new entrants were making much more noise (again ActiveHotels in the UK, Venere in Italy, HRS and Hotel.de in Germany, Booking in the Netherlands…) and seemed to get it right compared to the old brother WorldRes?

16 December 2008, we hear that WorldRes is acquired by a total stranger in my eyes called TravelHero. According to the press release in M-Travel and HotelMarketing.com, TravelHero based in Scottsdale, Arizona was founded by Rob Lamb in 1995 (same year as WorldRes) and has developed and operates the TravelHero
online travel planning (I heard about StayPlanner, GoPlanIt but never read anything about TravelHero) and distribution system in addition to other
proprietary reservation products and services including ResHero,
EventHero and GolfHero. Again the deal doesn't say anything on the terms and how much World is worth today. My gut feeling is that WRI has decided to let WorldRes go elsewhere because they found it difficult to turn it around. WRI is better off expending and developing their great asset like HostelWorld who is a leading online hostel booking engine with a great value proposition (don't get  me started with Boo.com by the way…).

So what TravelHero is going to do with this old lady? The future will tell but I don't think there is much to do with it. Consumers in this very competive online travel landscape will be hard to seduce again.

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

Click on the fullscreen button (the icon is the desktop screen) on the video player to enjoy better quality.

Wego is a travel meta search engine that is used to be called Bezurk. The company is based in Singapore.

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

The company aggregates all the different travel experiences that a traveler might be interested to book in advance prior to his trip. Things like trekking, day tour of Paris on a Segway, wine tasting, cooking lessons are among different activities you can find on the website. They already have a different strategy of positioning their offers from one country to another.  They compete directly with DoSomethingDifferent.com.

I believe this will be an interesting company to watch in the next year. Their value proposition complements other websites that solely concentrate on obvious travel components such as Air, Hotel, Car and Tranfers (and Trains sometimes).

I have asked Daniele Beccari, VP Operations for Europe, how Isango is making money, their growth looking forward, what are the things they will concentrate for next year and also how easy it was to raise capital from VCs in Q1 this year.

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

Zoover, one of the few travel related companies at Le Web08 was selected among the 30 start ups to compete last Tuesday. And Zoover delivered a great presentation - without an Internet access - in front of a thousands people.

Raphael Lucien was representing Zoover France and I have asked him a few questions about their expension plan, their business model. They really have some impressive growth figures, just look at their presentation and you will see why. The competition judges were particularly impressed by the fact the company is profitable in Germany and Netherlands and that they have a nice ambitious plan for next year.

Who said that you couldn't deliver an alternative proposition to the American TripAdvisor…

Source: Guillaume Thevenot

The new docklands developement consists of retail outlets, a concert arena, hotel and apartments. It's been crowned the tallest building in the city.

It's high time that Cork had the opprtunity to rival Dublin - Up Cork!

Read up here : http://www.thepost.ie/ezineSBP/story.asp?storyid=30994

Christina ; 0 )

Source: Christina Giliberti