HotelsCombined

Last updated

HotelsCombined
HotelsCombined logo.png
Type of business Subsidiary
Founded2005 (2005)
Headquarters
Sydney
,
Australia
Area served Worldwide
Founder(s) Yury Shar
Brendon McQueen
Michael Doubinski
Industry Travel
Technology
Search Engine
Products Metasearch for hotel prices
Parent Booking Holdings
(KAYAK division)
URL hotelscombined.com
Native client(s) on iOS, Android, Facebook Messenger

HotelsCombined, a unit of Booking Holdings, is a hotel metasearch engine founded in 2005, with headquarters in Sydney, Australia. [1]

Contents

The site operates in over 42 languages, handles 130 different currencies and aggregates more than 2 million deals from hundreds of travel sites and hotel chains. [2] The company employs over 200 staff. [1]

History

In 2005, Yury Shar, Brendon McQueen and Michael Doubinski partnered to create an all-encompassing hotel site where users could access the best rates from a variety of top travel sites all in the same place. All three founders previously worked for HotelClub, now absorbed and merged with Hotels.com. [1]

Initially working out of their homes and without having raised any financial capital, the HotelsCombined founders launched the site following nine months of development. The website steadily earned an organic consumer base[ clarification needed ]; within a year, the co-founders were able to hire their first employee. Today, HotelsCombined has nearly 200 employees and 17 million users monthly. The site is available in more than 220 countries and in over 42 different languages. [2] It was acquired by Booking Holdings in 2018 and became part of its KAYAK division.

Partners

HotelCombination agreed to provide hotel results to Ecosia's subsidiary: Ecosia Travel. [3] [4] [5]

Technology

HotelsCombined is a hotel metasearch engine. Through partnerships with numerous online travel agencies and hotel chains, HotelsCombined allows users to search and compare hotel rates in one search. It also provides an aggregated summary of hotel reviews and ratings from external sites.[ citation needed ]

Affiliate Program

HotelsCombined's Hotel Affiliate Program allows businesses to earn revenue by offering the hotel price comparison service on their website. Hotel content is available in over 42 languages, and the interface can be fully customized to allow businesses to retain their brand. [6]

In April 2012, the company began a partnership with low-cost airline Ryanair to power their hotel price comparison service, RyanairHotels.com. [7] HotelsCombined also powers the hotel search for the European flight comparison site momondo.com, [1] as well as Travelsupermarket (part of Moneysupermarket), and many others across Europe, Middle East and the rest of the world.[ citation needed ]

Awards

In 2010, HotelsCombined won TRAVELtech "Website of the Year" [8] and was named a finalist in the Telstra 2010 Business Awards. [9] In the same year, it was awarded ninth place in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific Ranking, [10] and was declared one of the top 10 travel websites by guidebook author Arthur Frommer (of Frommers.com). [11] In 2011, HotelsCombined was once more named one of the top 10 ranking Australian businesses in Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Program. [12] Also in 2011, the UK's The Independent named HotelsCombined one of the best money-saving websites [13] while Pauline Frommer named it a "terrific resource". [14]

On 30 November 2013, at the World Travel Awards, HotelsCombined won the "World's Leading Hotel Comparison Website 2013". [15] In 2014, HotelsCombined was named as the "World's Leading Hotel Price Comparison Site" [16] for the second consecutive year at the World Travel Awards.[ citation needed ]

Media

The company's Hotel Price Trend reports, which show hotel price trends aggregated across major travel sites and hotel chains, have been covered in publications around the world including the L.A. Times , [17] the Gulf Daily News [18] and The Australian . [19]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metasearch engine</span> Online information retrieval tool

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">News aggregator</span> Client software that aggregates syndicated web content

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Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kayak (company)</span> Travel metasearch engine owned and operated by Booking Holdings

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A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, reviews and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves, instead earning money from affiliate marketing agreements. In the United Kingdom, these services made between £780m and £950m in revenue in 2005. Hence, E-commerce accounted for an 18.2 percent share of total business turnover in the United Kingdom in 2012. Online sales already account for 13% of the total UK economy, and its expected to increase to 15% by 2017. There is a huge contribution of comparison shopping websites in the expansion of the current E-commerce industry.

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Whole Travel is a travel search engine website based in United States. Launched in 2008, it aggregates information from thousands of other travel sites and evaluates each destination's sustainability in order to help users find and book sustainable vacations. The service combines search results from hotel websites, online travel agencies, local consolidators and other sources such as larger hotel chains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LeapFish</span>

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Qantas checks into crowded online hotel market". Financial Review.
  2. 1 2 "Hotels Combined - Logos & Images". hotelscombined.com. Archived from the original on 25 January 2013. Retrieved 2 November 2012.
  3. ↑ "Ecosia Travel". Ecosia Travel. Retrieved 11 May 2021.
  4. ↑ "Ecosia Travel: make your next journey a green one". Ecosia Blog. Retrieved 11 May 2021.
  5. ↑ "What is Ecosia Travel?". Ecosia Blog. Retrieved 11 May 2021.
  6. ↑ "Index". hotelscombined.com. Archived from the original on 5 December 2013. Retrieved 6 December 2012.
  7. ↑ HotelMarketing.com Archived 7 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 2012-05-04
  8. ↑ TRAVEL Trends Archived 7 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 2012-05-04
  9. ↑ "Brilliant Businesses - Telstra Business Awards". Telstra Business Awards. Archived from the original on 2 November 2013.
  10. ↑ Yahoo! Finance Retrieved 2012-05-04
  11. ↑ "Budget Travel: These 10 websites can make a big difference in the cost of your next trip". capecodtimes.com. Archived from the original on 3 November 2012.
  12. ↑ "Fastest growing Aussie tech companies revealed". The Sydney Morning Herald. 17 November 2011.
  13. ↑ "Where the smart (phone) money is: The best money-saving apps and websites". The Independent. 12 October 2011.
  14. ↑ "Pauline Frommer: Hotel search engines dig deeper". thestar.com. 7 March 2011.
  15. ↑ "World's Leading Hotel Comparison Website 2013". World Travel Awards.
  16. ↑ "World's Leading Hotel Comparison Website 2014". World Travel Awards.
  17. ↑ "Hotel rates up and rising, studies find". Los Angeles Times . 16 September 2012.
  18. ↑ "GULF DAILY NEWS". gulf-daily-news.com. Archived from the original on 20 May 2015. Retrieved 2 November 2012.
  19. ↑ "Aussie hotel rates hiked". 1 March 2011.
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