Compiled by Parthivi Joshi
The travel industry is booming like never before. The number of people traveling globally has increased fourfold in the past few years.  The industry has seen sudden surge of online booking platform offering the ‘best travel deals’ across a gamut of offerings from airline tickets to hotel reservations.
People are spending their maximum time online – browsing the web for various offers to help them in their planning. According to the researchers, people mostly use their mobile phones to access the web followed by the applications and then browsing through the desktop. Hence travel companies are coming up with more and more innovative features, optimized and user friendly interfaces and offers to lure potential customers.
The 10 most popular travel booking websites worldwide has TripAdvisor and Booking.com ruling the roost with maximum online footfall and conversion rates. Despite many other websites offering similar services, the aforementioned platforms probably had the first mover advantage.
The value proposition of these websites in terms of listing is very simple – onboard hotels across various destinations and charges a certain rate as commission to the hoteliers. The convenience of finding plethora of listings on one platform along with their rates and all the details mentioned makes it a preferred option, rather than browsing one website at a time to know the details.
This is where Bidroom, a Dutch start up comes in, with a hope of outdoing Expedia and booking.com by applying a reverse strategy in the interest of the hotel owners. Founded by Ros and Casper Knieriem in early 2014 but launched the existing model in mid 2017. The office is based in Amsterdam.
In a new way of operating, Bidroom (as the name suggests) helps hotels list themselves out on the Bidroom platform for free/zero commission fees. Bidroom in turn asks the hotels to pass on information about room pricing directly to the guests. This works as Bidroom is getting hotels to sign up on their system in lieu of guest inventory for bidding purposes. The hotels, in turn offer dynamic room rates to the guests basis their capacity and occupancy. The average prices on Bidroom are 11-12 percent cheaper as compared to those on other sites like expedia and booking.com.
‘Take back control. Choose the alternative’ is the proposition that Bidroom is strongly leveraging on.  Ros strongly believes that the margins taken by the travel portals from the hoteliers are ridiculously high. The core value of the Bidroom’s business is the much-needed transparency the industry requires.
Bidroom was successful in signing up 1,20,000 hotels across 128 countries – a number that looks impressive, but there is still a long way to go before they can beef up their hotel inventory!
But Bidroom is definitely here to stay and disrupt the online travel booking industry. The clear intention with which the company was devised will see a huge demand in the near future.