Blog homeTripKick has just launched (in the last few days) and it looks like a website that is worth a quick look at.
URL: http://www.tripkick.com/
Concept: Not just hotel reviews - but community generated room level reviews
For example, rooms in the Clift Hotel (San Francisco)
Wow this is going to be a challenge…. firstly there is a great deal of data and secondly hotels just are not setup for taking bookings for specific rooms - so even if you know what room you want there may be a challenge in booking it.
As a quick recap to those unfamiliar with hotel operations, hotels tend to sell in one of three ways:
- By the room - for example small hotels and Bed & Breakfasts. e.g. the Sea View room, the Blue room etc
- By the room type - for example “double room”, “twin room” etc (tend to be mainly medium sized hotels)
- By the rate type - for example corporate rate, special rate for company ABC etc (often how the big hotels distribute)
Room level review information, instead of being useful to consumers, may actually be very interesting indeed to two constituencies:
- The hotel owner - as now you can find out which rooms could be yield managed differently to other rooms
- Tour operators making group bookings - sometimes in a group you have premium and non-premium guests…. although they may be all in the same room type. Now you can, when allocating rooms to guests, determine which people should go where (assumes that you have a tour leader in the group at checkin!)
So the TripKick idea could work…. but I wonder whether it is just “too much information”. However it is early days - and computers should be ideal at determining what data would be of interest to users - hence maybe TripKick will succeed with this.
They should probably look towards the trade for monetisation though (either as an additional data set to conventional hotel review websites - or to hotel owners / tour operators - to inform their operational decisions)
One to keep an eye on as in the first week a website is live it is hardly fair to give a thumbs up / thumbs down quite yet!
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Wow - seatguru (owned by TripAdvisor) for hotel rooms!
It will be interesting to see how this develops, particularly how successful the comments / blog aspect are going to be.
seatguru integrate research and comments (”email to help@ etc.”) but do not solicit input from travelers.
The other question is how hotels will handle (even more) free text requests (”we will read this and may act on it, but cannot guarantee anything”).
For the entrepreneurial hotelier this could lead to increasing hte number of room types and price accordingly. or other business models will develop…..
This takes me back to the days of designing a new (integrated) PMS/CRS at Forte Hotel Group (late ’90s), where assigning a specific room was part of the system. Who knows, maybe someone is going to crack this one and still have a working yield management system to go with it.
Interesting to see that there are already quite a number of hotels in their system. I guess the hotels see this as a good additional marketing channel (free for them at this stage, I would suppose), so why not!