By setting up Clever Bookings we set ourselves an incredible challenge, and have put ourselves in direct competition with the likes of expedia.com, hotels.com, and hotelpronto.com. Some have called it insane, others have called it brave, but we like to think of it as self-confident. We realise that we won’t be able to compete with the big boys overnight, but we’ve established a one-year, two-year, and five-year business plan that should help us get somewhere close.
To achieve this, we will rely predominantly on search engine traffic, as we dont have massiv advertising budgets as yet . We already know that there is a high demand for Internet hotel reservation websites. That was the easy part. We analysed what exactly people were searching for when looking to book a hotel online. Can you guess what the top key words and phrases people type into search engines such as Google are?
We have a complete list, including an estimation of how much traffic each key word and phrase generates per day.
Naturally, we won’t target all of these key words and phrases. Instead, we will choose those that appear in combinations and are more specific to Europe. You may have noticed that words like ‘online’, ‘reservations’ and cheap’ – combined with city names like London, Paris, or Barcelona – appear often. These will be our main targets.
Our aim for the first year is to secure 2,000 hotel reservations per month, and this will be the same for our second year. The next stage of our business plan will be to secure more bookings than hotelpronto.com, which is generating 12,000 bookings per month on average. More impressively, 12,000 bookings per month generate 4,400,000 euros per month. Something we wouldn’t mind matching, either!
Wolfgang Brand
2 responses so far ↓
Hoteles.es // September 18, 2008 at 10:24 am
I think insane !
hotels // February 5, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Best of luck, your booking targets are very challenging especially, as you mention, with a limited advertising budget.