Friday, March 31, 2017

Hotel booking site has almost single-handedly changed the hotel game for both business and leisure travelers with the option to book shorter hotel stays whenever they need them at a fraction of the regular nightly rate to save guests money as well as tedious hours waiting



Those who have had their share of long layovers, delayed flights, arriving too early for check-in or even paying too much for a bed might be interested in what Hotel booking offers weary travelers.

The Brazilian hotel booking site has almost single-handedly changed the hotel game in its home country.

Thanks to this brainchild by Brazilian entrepreneurs Max Campos and Pedro both business and leisure travelers now have the option to book shorter hotel stays (by blocks of three, six, nine and twelve hours) whenever they need them at a fraction of the regular nightly rate. This saves guests money as well as tedious hours waiting.

It also allows the company’s over 700 hotel partners to not only sell unsold rooms but also make extra revenue even at full capacity.


"HotelQuando.com is the first Latin American platform to book hotels by the hour. Basically, we give people the possibility to book a hotel room for less than the daily rate.

Every time we travel a lot, we have situations when we need a hotel just for a few hours. Sometimes, people, they don’t think of that possibility because there’s no such thing, so a lot of times we spend a lot of hours at the airport, at a restaurant. We arrive too early at a hotel, so we have to wait a lot of hours before check-in. A lot of situations like that made us think that we could create a new possibility.

The hotel market hasn’t changed in many, many years. Ever since the hotel market started, people have been booking rooms by daily rates, and there’s also the day-use rate. But what we do is different. You can pick what time you want to check-in, and for how long you want to stay at the hotel. So if you need to stay at a hotel just for three hours—to take a shower, to rest before a flight, to extend your check out, or get an early check in, you can have all these possibilities right now."

"Yes, everything is made online. We have a website—we started only with the website—and now we also have an app available for both iOS and Android. You can do the whole process online; and depending on the hotel, you can pay online or pay directly at the hotel."

"The idea actually came to Max because he had these situations happen all the time with him. He used to work in a big company in Brazil called Carvalho Hosken. It’s real estate, and he used to travel a lot for the company. He always had these situations where he would just go to a hotel late at night and then leave early in the morning. He had to pay for the full daily rate, and he would just stay 10, 11 hours at the hotel. And also sometimes, he had to wait a long time at the airport.

He dealt with a lot of these situations while he was working, and he had always wanted his own business. So he decided to quit his job and start HotelQuando.com because of the experiences he had."

“''Quando' is Portuguese, it means 'when.' We were thinking about names, and Max came up with it because the idea is like “a hotel whenever you want.” We talked to a lot of people, and everyone had good feedback saying that it’s exotic and different. So we thought we should keep the name.
That’s what it means. If you translate exactly how it is, it’s Hotel When."

How was it received when first launched in Brazil during 2014?
"At first, we had a lot of struggle with the hotel industry because it was a new thing. Every time you do something new, there’s a little bit of resistance. So a lot of the hotels, at first, thought it would be a lot more trouble, that it wouldn’t be good.

So we had to go to all the hotels, called all the hotels. Some of them really had an open mind, and they believed in our idea and that the hotel industry needed to create something new. After we got a few hotels, we also had a PR agency there help us with the press releases.

After we got the first hotels and they started doing reservations, people started to realize that our model could bring extra revenue, could bring new clients. And that started to spread. After a while, we got more hotels and we finally closed deals with the main hotel chains. Once we got our first hotel chain, all the other hotels started coming.

At first, it was hard to get hotels and we had to convince them. But now, we have over 700 hotels all over Brazil in all states, all the main airports. Now every day, we have hotels coming to us. So right now, we have a different scenario because the hotels are actually approaching us. And now we have all the main chains in Brazil: AccorHotels, Atlantica Hotels, Transamerica, BHG."

"We started in Brazil during the low season, because Brazil was facing a big crisis. So it was a good time for us to start and understand. As I said, we are platform of extra revenue, so we register maybe one to ten percent of the hotel rooms. We don’t register a lot of rooms because we want to sell what the hotel is not selling.

We also have the information because we have been working in the hotel business for the last two years, so we’ve been studying it a lot. And we found out that even the hotels that have 100 percent occupancy, most of the people arrive late at night at the hotels. So they already work the overbooking concept.

If you can work with this, you can book flights, for example, if you know that 30 percent of your guests are arriving late at night and you have a staff right there in the afternoon, you can book the hotels for three hours in the afternoon. And you have your staff there to get the room ready and clean for when the next guest arrives at night."

"Yes, because we are very flexible with the hotels. We have four different packages. We have three, six, nine and twelve hours, and the hotels can pick which packages they want to work with and what times they want to offer the check-in.

So it’s not like they're going to sign all the packages and check in 24 hours a day. If a hotel has a high occupancy, they can do what I just told you. If they have a low occupancy, they can register more rooms, register more packages and more check in times. It’s really easy, and it’s very flexible.
Another thing that’s very important that the hotels should really know is that we don’t take commissions from the hotels. Right now, especially in Brazil, there is this big movement in which the hotels are trying to get away from and stop working with OTAs because they are working with very high commissions, taking a lot of the hotels’ money.

We want to work together with the hotels, so we don’t charge any commissions. We only have a small fee that we charge the guests, but it’s a hundred percent free for the hotels. It’s extra revenue at zero cost."

"The US is the biggest market in the world. If you have a list of the twenty biggest airports in the world, maybe half of them are in the US. We have Chicago, which is the airport with main connections in the whole world; we have Atlanta, which is the biggest airport. Hotels near the airport are very important to us.

We are already in South America—we are also expanding to the rest of Latin America. Right now, we are only in Brazil, but we are also expanding to Colombia, which is going to be the main headquarters in Latin America that can talk to all the other countries that speak Spanish. We picked these two countries (US and Colombia) because we think they are very strategic to us.
And also, it’s a very new concept in the US that is starting now. In Europe, there are a few websites that do something similar so we thought that the US would be more important."

"We actually have two different types of consumers. We have the business travelers, because as I said, that’s where the idea came from. We actually have an extranet for companies where they can register and book hotels for their employees. 60% of our clients right now are business travelers.

And also—this is something we communicate a lot to people—the local guests, the people from their own cities who, if they knew that there’s this possibility of booking a room for a few hours and paying a fair price, could book a room to relax, get out of their routine, and enjoy the nice pool at the hotel.

For example, Sao Paolo is the city in Brazil where HotelQuando has more hotels. It’s a big city and it’s not on the coast, so in the summer it gets really hot. So we have a lot of people that book hotels to enjoy the pools, enjoy the room service.

So we have two types of clients: the corporate travelers and the people that need a hotel in their own cities to enjoy or if they’re going to travel and they need early check in, late check out."

I’m glad you brought up the hotel pools because I wanted to ask, how much or how many of the hotel facilities and room amenities would HotelQuando.com guests have access to?

"When a person books a hotel for a few hours, it’s exactly the same as if he booked for a full day. The only difference is that his stay is going to be shorter. But he can use all the facilities.

If the hotel has room service, he can do room service. If it has a restaurant, he can eat at the restaurant. If there’s a pool, he can use the pool. We even have some hotels that offer breakfast for overnight bookings of 12 hours in Brazil. The guests have access to all the amenities."

"Yes, right now we have a call center in Brazil. On the website, we also have online chatting to get answers.

It’s a good thing that you mentioned that because in the beginning, we had an extranet for the hotels so that every time there was a booking, this booking is sent to the hotel, and sometimes we had a little confusion. The guest would get to the hotel, and they wouldn’t find his reservation. So what we did was, right now we have a connection in Brazil with a hotel channel manager called Omnibees. The hotels connect all the OTAs in the same place.

So when a person books through us, the information goes directly to the hotel through the same channel they use with all the other OTAs. So the problem of a reservation not getting to the hotel, we don’t have that anymore."

"Yes, once we start, we are also going to have a call center team in the US and also in Colombia."

We also have an extranet for travel agencies. If they want to register in the platform to book hotels for their clients, we have a special extranet for them.
Are there any US hotels already in your roster right now?

"We are still in the early stages. We are talking to some hotels. But I can’t actually say the names right now because we haven’t completely closed the deal yet. But before we came to the US, we started talking to some of the hotels because some of the chains we have in Brazil also have hotels in the US. Once we get everything ready, the platform, the call center, we can disclose the hotel names."

When is your target launch date for HotelQuando US?
"We are planning to launch in the second half of April. We’re very close. We’re just finishing the last details, starting to finish the legal aspects so we can start it!"

"Well, I think it will impact it in a very big way. As I said before, ever since the tourist market started, it hasn’t changed a lot. The hotels have been booking for daily rates, and right now a different kind of market coming up—Airbnb, for example.

So the hotel market needs to do something to reinvent itself, putting technology in its services and offering the clients what they need.

And it’s a trend. Everybody knows that this is a trend. People right now are only paying for what they use, pay-per-use, services that really fit their needs. So we’re doing something new in a market that hasn’t done something new in a long time. We’re trying to change something that has been done for many years, which is the daily rate, and we’re trying to break that into small parts in a way that is going to be good for the clients and that is going to be good for the hotels.

I think it’s a big change, and it’s a good change for both sides.
It’s not a lot of trouble to expand. If the hotels are willing to offer the service, we can register them on the same day and we can start selling. Because they don’t have to pay us anything, there’s no bureaucratic situation, it’s very easy to register. And it’s very easy to expand to other countries.
We have a very big expectation for 2017. We believe that 2017 is going to be the greatest year in HotelQuando history.

HotelQuando.com came as a new tool to solve a problem for everyone who travels, everyone who needs another option. We wanted to do something different, and we wanted to work together with the hotels. It’s very important that the hotels are satisfied; that they are seeing that it’s good for them. That’s why we don’t charge them anything. HotelQuando.com is a hotel-friendly company."
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