Three months after revealing a switch from its original vision of a trip planning site, Groupize has unveiled its hotel booking service for groups.
The system, which replaces the original group trip planning service which originally launched in 2010 [TLabs Showcase - Groupize], allows groups to search for and book up to 25 rooms at a property.
Groupize has enlisted up to 25,000 hotels to take part in the service.
Users can mix the number of people heading on a trip with the number of rooms required and being shared. Once the results are returned (similar to other search systems), the group planner selects a hotel and holds a block of rooms before allowing guests to claim an individual room.
The group travel category is estimated to be worth around $31 billion a year.
Despite kicking off as a planning service, in October last year, president and CEO, Charles de Gaspe Beaubien admitted VCs and angels “weren’t ready to believe in us. They wanted us to prove the technology first…”.
Despite this the company still managed to attract a “few million dollars” in revenue in 2011 and achieve profitability.
De Gaspe Beaubien now says:
“In spite of the innovation in other segments of travel, the group travel business has changed very little in recent years.
“Groupize has been developed from the ground up using the latest technologies to provide a more efficient way of booking group trips, which until now has primarily been done offline or via RFPs.”
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About Kevin May
Anyone remember what happened to Groople? There was a lot of noise around them in 2007 (http://tims-boot.blogspot.com.au/2007/08/groople-was-first-to-group-but-is-now.html) then they sold the company for a token $100k in 2009 (http://www.shortstravel.com/shortstravel/Difference/press/2009_01_20.cfm)
Big question for Groupize is what are you going to do different to Groople?
Is inventory connected to a bedbank like hotelspro or hotelbeds?
Signing up 25,000 hotels directly is no easy task..
Tim,
Very pertinent question. Groople and Group Travel Planet were the 2 first pioneers to try and capture the $31B small group travel market. Both were started in the early 2000s’ and unfortunately ran out of money trying around the 2008-2009 era.
Although they were focused on the same space, there were several factors that wouldn’t allow them to succeed: Technology systems and languages of 10 years ago, the way they connected and interacted with hotel systems, working with semi-automated processes, customer acquisition strategy and having to invent the social aspect back then.
We’re confident we’ve learned from their experiences and that the timing is right with even more “do it yourself” planners going online to book small groups and using social channels to communicate.
There is a reason Group Travel hasn’t been automated to date. It is really HARD, but we feel we got the right team around the table to fixe this broken space.
Joon,
Groupize is connected to the Hotel CRSs in order to offer the inventory functionality required for an automated Group Travel booking engine.
Although this looks similar to other booking engines, it acts completely different under the hood. For example, Groupize offers Group Rates, checks Group Inventory and offers automated modifications (name changes, upgrades and cancels). Groupize also offers Planner Tools and a rules engine to manage groups which “automagically” auto populate the hotel’s reservation systems while working with their Group systems.
As you can imagine, connecting to a 3rd party hotel broker wouldn’t allow us this flexibility and functionality.
Stay tuned for some more developments on the hotel and supply side in the coming weeks.
Looks like a compelling and easy to use tool for a huge market as stated. The key challenge, I guess, similar to the one the many trip planning sites face is how to attract a huge audience to generate business without breaking the bank.
Of course, there always remains the option of an acquisition by one of the established OTAs which obviously to have both the traffic and supplier relationships on a large scale and might be interested in the functionality.
Guess we’ll find out over time.