In this business, the big competitors all reserve a bunch of rooms in the hotels and manage their booking themselves. The hotel is then not allowed to touch these rooms.
The model here was to give the hotels a reception-desk piece of software and have them use it to maintain availability. A lot of the hotels that signed up had nothing like this, so it was definitely a win for them. Armed with exact availability, you can have a much better booking system (and of course, if the hotel only wanted to give you a chunk of their rooms, they're perfectly capable of doing that).
Hotels can sign up on their own (including local bank details, etc) and just need to be reviewed before showing up on the site. It supports i18n, scheduled payments, lots of bells and whistles.
The fact of the matter is that this failed because of market reasons (too small a market, dominated by big players, primarily) but it may have a niche somewhere else on this planet. :)
Is it possible to pivot into another market sector.
For example, holiday home rentals? bed & breakfast? car rentals? I think there is a lot of potential in the car rental market... e.g. allow private vehicle owners to rent out their vehicles. There are probably a few insurance details to work out, otherwise it sounds like you have 80% of that sort of system built already.
My brother works in the travel software industry (for a big player) and that market is an extremely hard nut to crack, unless you are coming at it with a boat load of contacts and money.
The big tour operators (I know this from the European side) are quite well tied into the bug boys contractually. They often will enforce sole-usage on hotels to prevent this kind of side market entry your parents have attempted. the hotels can be penalized or dropped from the operator's books, for simply offering rooms outside the tour operator.
Interesting. I have a client who has a booking engine for their very specific education tour company and have been wondering if I could port the software for resale. They sell direct to the traveler no agents or 3rd parties so it works well for them but I've been curious if this model is adopted widely..
I don't know enough about the larger industry and what barriers there are to entry however. What kinds of tour operators in Europe are blocking entry to the market? Is this just tour groups making certain hotels exclusive, or the booking sites?
In this business, the big competitors all reserve a bunch of rooms in the hotels and manage their booking themselves. The hotel is then not allowed to touch these rooms.
The model here was to give the hotels a reception-desk piece of software and have them use it to maintain availability. A lot of the hotels that signed up had nothing like this, so it was definitely a win for them. Armed with exact availability, you can have a much better booking system (and of course, if the hotel only wanted to give you a chunk of their rooms, they're perfectly capable of doing that).
Hotels can sign up on their own (including local bank details, etc) and just need to be reviewed before showing up on the site. It supports i18n, scheduled payments, lots of bells and whistles.
The fact of the matter is that this failed because of market reasons (too small a market, dominated by big players, primarily) but it may have a niche somewhere else on this planet. :)