Ask HN: Rate My Startup - LetMeGo: Let lodgings bid for your stay

I'm currently employed in the hotel industry. I really have no defined role, but I perform a lot of the GM roles. I can give you a few things to think about.<p>First and foremost, the chain to which we belong just got out of a long fight with a large Online Travel Agency [OTA]. During this "fight", the chain really noticed that OTA's had a stranglehold on the online room distributions, especially the rates so in response, they have "initiated" some policies to nip that in the butt. (OTA's are currently killing Vegas)<p>I will show you the breakdown of our reservation distribution this year: 55% CHAINWEBSITE.com, 27% CHAIN Call Center, 9% GDS Travel Agencies, 9% Third Party Websites (broken down into Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity). In short, due to our policies we CANNOT offer a lower price outside of our best available rate available on the CHAINWEBSITE.com - we could null our franchise agreement.<p>I only speak for one chains policies, but this chain has 6k properties and another 1k or so in development. It's not small.<p>Thats one thing to think about. Some more thoughts:<p>Getting GMs to lower rates is tough; if you give guest X rate Y, and guest Z finds out, they also want rate Y. It sometimes makes a messy situation dealing with this. Selling rooms in important, but keep rate integrity intact is also important.<p>Chicken/Egg conundrum. How do you plan on getting hotels to participate?<p>-- In response to the above, I would personally like to search my geographical area for any travelers without having to sign the hotel up. Can I do that? Why not?<p>Some solutions to the above thoughts:<p>Instead of getting hotels to directly negotiate prices, why not use a combination of that and a GDS system like Amadeus, SABRE or Galileo. You know, so if a hotel doesn't bid on their trip to offer occupancy, then they have the option of making a booking through your system opposed defaulting to Expedia (which books through the same systems). It might solve the intermittency between the chicken/egg problem, and having an active user base - attracting one before the other would be essential. Overall, I don't think the hotel industry will take kindly to having to bid for guests. On the other hand, there is LOTS of money to be had and I wish you the very best. Its an ambitious start!

LetMeGo is a new service that allows travelers to submit their itineraries so that lodgings bid for their stays: <a href="http://letmego.com" rel="nofollow">http://letmego.com</a><p>LetMeGo is the result of the famous/infamous immersion discussed in here "Results of: 7 developers, working 24/7 for 90 days, 1 house (in Colombia)" <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730031" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730031</a><p>I know I don't participate a lot in HN. In part because I discovered you only a few months ago and in part because I've quite busy getting LetMeGo ready for launch. Anyway, I look forward for your feedback and to participate more and more in here.<p>Thanks!

Not too impressed by being told Chrome isn't good enough for your site!

I absolutely love the intro videos, especially the one narrated by Obama and Ozzy Osbourne

I was confused by the video tour. I clicked watch video tour and was given the option of who to narrate it. Unfortunately I didn't know what that was. I thought I was looking at a rhetorical question along the lines of "you pick your favorite music, so how do you pick your favorite lodging?" or something like that. I'd suggest changing the heading of that to "Which narrator do you want?" or something with the word narrator.<p>That was my only nitpick. I tried out the interface and I love it. This is a really cool app that I find to be really well put together.. It does have the Catch 22 of you need lodgings to get users and users to get lodgings. Hopefully you find a way around that.

I'd get rid of the yellow note at the bottom---at least from the home page. You could handle uncaught exceptions and then display the note, for example, or put it in the About Us page.<p>Us Colombians are too polite, so it would probably be OK to display upfront if it was local. The Beta logo should be enough for most people. The note just predisposes users to think something might go wrong.

Looks good...but from a usability standpoint, would it kill you to label the fields? Which one is start date, which one is end date. What about i18n? "Where are you going?" is a little too ambiguous I think. I presume that's what you were going for, but locality can be quite granular. Hopefully there is an intuitive interpreter parsing that text.

The layout reminds me of the food pyramid -&#62; <a href="http://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-public/documents/image/ucm070186.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-public/documents/image/...</a> (Not a bad thing!) except the style of the layers is not consistent. Applying some color theory would certainly help. There seems to be ~9 different fonts on the front page. As for the concept of the site: the notion of inverting the business model is really neat, I hope it succeeds.

I really liked in the video that you could skip ahead to different parts. What did you use to do that?<p>I liked the videos, and thought the different voices was an interesting gimmick, though I personally would load a video as soon as the user clicked the first link, and while it is loading give them the option to switch between voices. How many people click the first link without clicking to watch the video?

Looks really good, great design. A couple minor specific notes...<p>-"Lodgings" is an awkward word to use in the main description. I agree that it is the most accurate word to use, but I think few people think of the term "lodgings" when looking for hotels.<p>-Your "How it works" section looks cool, but it's an image. No text. That's not very semantic. It also means I can't copy and paste the description to tell a friend.

I love this idea. I'll try it out on my next trip. I love the videos they're awesome - although since your site looks AJAX-ie you might want to consider opening the videos in a "lightbox" popup - I tried several times to find the close button on the first video I opened - because I didn't realize it open a new page ...or you can just sum it up to my stupidity :p

my thoughts:<p>too many options for the video tour. i mean, i didn't have a problem figuring it out, and i enjoyed what i saw, but you're going to find that some users will get confused. from the standpoint of converting customers, provide a default and start it playing, and then provide other options if they want to get silly.<p>i'm not sure how i feel about the red box on the map. i kind of think that it should be a bit more static, so that it doesn't automatically re-search each time the zoom changes or i scroll the map. but i can't think of a good solution off the top of my head.<p>there are a few references to st.hal.biz, where its clear that it should be just hal.biz. example: <a href="http://st.hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif" rel="nofollow">http://st.hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif</a> is showing up as a broken image vs <a href="http://hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif" rel="nofollow">http://hal.bz/img/global/guarantee120.gif</a>

Looks pretty cool.<p>When I was on the 'iternerary' view the bar at the top of the screen changing colors drove me crazy though.

I`m using Chrome/Ubuntu 9.10 and got the warning message. Everything worked fine though.<p>After selecting my travel dates, I got the impression that the whole page would scroll down, not just the left column. It was a bit confusing I think.<p>I´m not a fan of nesting scroll bars.<p>I will test the service out for real in a couple of months.

I won't repeat what others said above, but I will add that I feel the home page is too gray / dark. The "search" page has a better color balance than the homepage. The way it is now it's rather depressing, and less inviting. Pretty nice otherwise.

Are you able to share what strategies you have for increasing participation among lodgings businesses? It seems to me that this would be a big challenge and a huge factor in your success, and I am curious how you address it.

great idea and great execution (from what I can see). The narration idea is very original with the video intro. But I do agree with other commenter that it was odd to have to pick a narration. I'd suggest you pick the one you like best or which best shows off the capabilities, and just use that, or rotate through them. Even though you went through the effort to create the different videos, it is best to keep something like that simple for the user.

Where did you get all of the hotel data (rating, amenities, types, of rooms, pictures, etc.)? Are the hotels that sign up required to submit that information?

Cool looking site .. but where did you get the voice from?

Great idea. I will use it next time I travel and if I get a great deal I'll be a loyal customer.

Damn. I was hoping you were making an app to let landlords bid on desirable tenants.