HotelsCombined

Last updated

HotelsCombined
HotelsCombined logo.png
Type of business Subsidiary
Founded2005 (2005)
Headquarters,
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

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

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

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.

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

Kayak is a metasearch engine for travel services, including airline flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages. It is owned and operated by Booking Holdings.

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.

A travel website is a website that provides travel reviews, trip fares, or a combination of both. Over 1.5 billion people book travel per year, 70% of which is done online.

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>

LeapFish.com was a search aggregator that retrieved results from other portals and search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo!, and also search engines of blogs, videos etc. It was a registered trademark of Dotnext Inc, launched on 3 November 2008.

Momondo is a travel fare aggregator and travel fare metasearch engine. momondo was founded in Denmark and is today managed by KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings.

Corporate travel management is the function of managing a company’s strategic approach to travel, the negotiations with all vendors, day-to-day operation of the corporate travel program, traveler safety and security, credit-card management and travel and expenses ('T&E') data management.

Rome2Rio is an Australian online multimodal transport journey planner offering travel services globally. The company is based in Melbourne, Australia, and is owned by the German online travel comparison and booking website Omio.

Trivago N.V., marketed with lowercase styling as trivago, is a German technology company specializing in internet-related services and products in the hotel, lodging and metasearch fields. The company is headquartered in Düsseldorf. The American online travel company Expedia Group owns a majority of the company's stock.

VoyagerMoinsCher.com is a French price comparison website specialised in finding travel deals. The site compares flights, holidays, tours, cruises, weekend breaks, hotels and holiday rentals in over 150 countries from France’s biggest travel operators. It gives internet users access to search engines, metasearch engines and promotional deals.

eDreams is an online travel agency based in Barcelona, Spain, that offers deals in regular and charter flights, low-cost airlines, hotels, car rentals, dynamic packages, holiday packages and travel insurance.

Tripfez Travel is an online travel agency and metasearch engine focusing on Muslims and Halal tourism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liligo.com</span> Metasearch engine

liligo.com is a metasearch engine that specialises in travel. Launched in 2006, the website does not sell anything but allows users to compare travel products.

Sojern is a marketing company specializing in services for the travel industry. It utilizes programmatic advertising and machine learning to assist travel businesses in identifying and targeting potential customers across various digital media channels.

Pronto Hotel is a metasearch engine for hotel prices, founded in 2007 and based in Rome, Italy.

Booking Holdings Inc. is an American travel technology company incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law and based in Norwalk, Connecticut, that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines including namesake and flagship Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda, Kayak, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable. It operates websites in about 40 languages and 200 countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kiwi.com</span> Czech online travel agency

Kiwi.com is a Czech online travel agency founded by Oliver Dlouhý and Jozef Képesi in 2012. Kiwi.com provides a fare aggregator, metasearch engine and booking for airline tickets and ground transportation. Its ticket search features Kiwi.com’s "virtual interlining" concept – itineraries combined from over 750 carriers, including many that do not usually cooperate in online bookings.

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.