Qantas Announce New Website – Hooroo

Today Qantas have announced a new website called hooroo that will allow people to book accommodation directly.

And no. It’s not a website. It’s a “social commerce platform”.

Bullshit.

To me it looks like a website.

At this stage it details are a little sketchy. When asked, none of Hooroo’s management was able to quantify how many accommodation partners had signed up to the website. Although I did ask (cheekily) for them to express the amount of inventory they have as a percentage of the wotif website inventory. They declined to answer that question.

The site itself seems fairly straight forward. You know, you look at an area, press a button and up comes a grid of accommodation options. The user interface is quite simple with a clean, easy to navigate design.

But for me, it all then seems to fall over a bit.

Despite having fewer accommodation listings than the competition, Hooroo are betting that the users will generate the content that the site needs. The site employed 25 bloggers (or “stars” as they call them) to provide some initial content. Descriptions and images of hotels are provided by the hotels themselves (something fraught with danger), and you will be able to see trip advisor reviews.

Which is kind of the point. If I want to share my holiday experience there are a stack of websites that will allow me to do this. You may have heard of some of these websites already. Facebook anyone? Twitter?

If I want to book accommodation I will just book accommodation. Whatever website will give me the best rate and take my money with the least pain. And despite being as ugly as my ginger headed step brother, wotif does that job very very well.

Hooroo is a business that would look great on a white board.

“Hey lets not worry about creating content. That’s expensive. Let’s get the users to create the content. Let’s not review or photograph hotels. Let’s get the hotels to do that themselves”. You can imagine the conversation.

But I am not sure that they quite have the winning formula yet. Hooroo aims to do two seperate (and quite distinct) functions.

1. Inspire Pople to visit a place
2. Get People to visit that place (and book their accommodation with hooroo).

The problem as I see it is that these two inflection points in the decision making process are quite different stages of the sales cycle. I get inspired by many things around me. And sometimes they remind me or motivate me to travel. Those motivations come from art, lliterature, theatre, mass media (and yes) blogs. Thousands of small nudges finally get you to take the plunge and make the booking.

See what I am saying? The booking point is a point in time well past the inspiration point.

And if I was building a website to inspire people to travel more, I would be using a hell of a lot more resources than 25 bloggers.

But that said, anything that helps to fragment the online booking industry is a good thing. Wotif posted a profit of $51M last year. They hold a distorted amount of power in the online booking space, and competition can only serve to make the online booking landscape better for us consumers. Whether the competition from hooroo will be the catalyst for this change remains to be seen.