A booking site created by hotels. Should hostels do the same?

Frustrations with booking sites are not limited to the hostel industry. Many of the big hotel chains got together to create their own booking website as an answer to Online Travel Agencies like Expedia and Booking.com. The resulting product is called RoomKey.

Vikram Singh, an online revenue strategist, had some pretty critical views on the group’s marketing plan for the site.

RoomKey.com: Hotel Brands’ Misguided Attempt to Become an OTA

The biggest problem is the use of pop-up windows to capture customers.

You should know that you are setting yourself up for failure when your core marketing strategy revolves around pop-ups… RoomKey.com gets the majority of its traffic from a “pop-under” that annoyingly appears when you close any participating brand website.

He also had criticism about the site traffic.

[RoomKey.com’s CEO] said that only 5% [of site visitors] were direct visits (people who typed Roomkey.com into their browser window). Analytics 101 tells us that with 5% direct visits, the Roomkey.com brand is not actively building itself online.

Mr. Singh’s next comments probably identify the biggest problem for the future development of the site, and a difficult challenge to overcome:

There is another fundamental problem with the site. The “beta” launch did not include any independent hotels. You can’t be a travel engine/online agent if you exclude an entire segment of the hotel industry. Launching with only the brands that paid for Room Key is going to come back to bite them, as they are now actively seeking to add independent hotels. Why won’t the independents want to join? Simple answer. Suspicion. How do independent hotels know that Marriott, Hilton and Wyndam hotels will not always be Room Key darlings? How can they expect to get fair representation? Not a smart move for an “innovative hotel search engine.”

Absolutely right! We can look at the hostel industry to see the truth in this. Most of us run our own independent hostels. It’s reasonable to think that we might have the same concerns if the big hostel chains came together to create a new booking site. We might suspect that the result would look something like HW’s proposal for NYC, with independent hostels being brushed aside in preference of those big chains. We would be even more suspicious if the initial launch didn't include any of us.

While RoomKey’s marketing methods may need some adjustment, the idea behind it – a booking site built by the hotels themselves – is a good concept.

We frequently hear hostels talking about their frustration over the shortage of options when it comes to booking sites that actually target our market. Rather than worrying about it, we could actually create the site that we would want to work with, promote it to our guests, and remove our reliance on HW.

Do you think the hostel industry should create an independent booking site to compete with the OTAs like HW/HB? If an independent site were created by hostels, would you support it with bed allocation and promote it to your guests? What challenges would we have to overcome to make it successful?