The first successful auction site for hotel rooms

The approach of Second Company

An entrepreneur had been running a hotel in the province of Utrecht with his wife for 20 years when he started an auction site alongside the hotel. The entrepreneur had been sitting around the table with colleagues for months and finally persuaded more and more parties to place their hotel rooms on his site. A man with real business instincts and guts, because not everyone dares to make deals with colleagues in this way.

The entrepreneur sold his first hotel room for 1 euro on the auction site. A whole media circus was set up, which caused a lot of commotion and popularity. However, this popularity also had a downside: the website was not up and running due to the large number of visitors. The site was regularly down because the database could not cope.

The entrepreneur therefore called in the help of Second Company to solve this problem. Within a few weeks we provided a design for a scalable architecture, so that all transactions could be processed without problems. The platform became the first successful auction site for hotel rooms. In a short time it grew into a company with 30 employees, millions of transactions and tens of millions in turnover.

However, many end users of the site subsequently complained that the availability of rooms was unclear. The boss once again put his trust in Second Company to solve this problem. We ensured that the availability of the rooms was made more visible during the auction via a calendar. A change that yielded many positive reactions from end customers. This gave the site another boost in success, as a result of which, for months on end, it outgrew Vakantieveilingen.nl in terms of visitors.

Our collaboration with Hotelkamerveiling.nl was very productive, as they themselves formulated clear requirements and embraced change. As a result, we were able to realise an optimal real-time auction system for the hotel owner, a hotel reservation system with links to all important databases of major hotel chains in Europe (or the possibility for the hotels to fill in the details themselves), extensive online payment options and an invoicing system with thorough back-office integration. Finally, we ensured that the affiliated hotel chains could also run auctions on their own websites with their own payment systems integrated.