Hipmunk is first hotel booking service on Yelp Platform

Steven Loeb · October 21, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/39e6

Yelp now has around 28,000 businesses on the Platform, which accounts for 250,000 transactions

Last summer, leveraging its huge database of businesses, Yelp launched Yelp Platform, which allows businesses and consumers to make transactions directly on the business’s Yelp listing. The company started mostly with restaurants and  food delivery services, as well partnerships with with Booker, Intuit’s Demandforce and MindBody for spas, yoga studios, salons and dental appointment booking.

Now, for the first time, Yelp is getting into a new category: travel, through an announced partnership with its newest Yelp Platform partner, meta-search travel site Hipmunk.

Launched in 2011, Hipmunk helps people save time and money by comparing top travel sites to show the flight or hotel at the cheapest price. Now users can do the same thing without ever having to leave Yelp.

Yelp users who search for hotels will see a "Reserve a Room" button on supported hotel pages. Once they click on that, the user will be taken to a booking page within Yelp, where they can complete all purchase information. Hipmunk then confirms the reservation and sends confirmation e-mail to the user.

Hipmunk is coming off a fresh $20 million round of funding, which it raised in May, and which brought its total funding to $40.2 million. This type of partnership will no doubt help the company both grow its user base and to help its justify that funding to its investors.

"Yelp is a like-minded brand in a different industry," Adam Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of Hipmunk, said in a statement. "They care about making things fast and easy for users, just like we do. We're excited to integrate with Yelp Platform to offer our experience to a new set of users."

And, from Yelp's point of view, they get to expand to new verticals, which the company decided it wanted to do right away.

"After launching Yelp Platform, we knew we wanted to expand to additional categories," Mike Ghaffary, VP Business and Corporate Development at Yelp, said in statement. 

Hipmunk is  the first partnership in this vertical, but its doubtful that it will be the last.

Additional partnerships

On top of the addition of Hipmunk, Yelp also revealed a bunch of other new partnerships in the food delivery space. It has also integrated with EatStreet, ChowNow and Ordr.in, as well CellarPass for users to make winery reservations.

In all, Yelp now has roughly 28,000 businesses available for booking on the site, including food delivery partners delivery.com and Eat24.  They accounted for 250,000 transactions through the third quarter of this year.

The company is set to release its Q3 earnings on Wednesday.

(Image source: onwebmapping.blogspot.com)

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Yelp

Startup/Business

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Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what's great (and not so great) in your world. You already know that asking friends is the best way to find restaurants, dentists, hairstylists, and anything local. Yelp makes it fast and easy by collecting and organizing your friends' recommendations in one convenient place.

Yelp is...

...the ultimate city guide that taps into the community's voice and reveals honest and current insights on local businesses and services on everything from martinis to mechanics.

...just real people, writing real reviews, and that's the real deal.

...a fun and engaging place for passionate and opinionated influencers to share the experiences they've had with local businesses and services.

...the definitive local guide in the San Francisco Bay Area and a force to be reckoned with in Chicago, New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle. But really, we're everywhere. From Austin to Madison and everywhere in between, reviews are coming in from all over the country!

...word of mouth marketing - amplified. Savvy local marketers now have a great channel to effectively target local consumers.

Since July 2004, co-founders Jeremy Stoppelman (CEO) and Russel Simmons (CTO) and their Yelp crew have been striving to make life better for people who love to patronize great local businesses. Discovering accurate information on local establishments has never been this entertaining. Writing reviews has never been this fun, easy and addictive!

Hipmunk

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Hipmunk is a meta-search travel site and app that helps save time and money by comparing top travel sites to show the perfect flight or hotel at the cheapest price. We’re eliminating the agony involved in travel planning. With Hipmunk, there’s no need to search through pages and pages of results, because we present the most convenient first. There’s also no need to toggle between several tabs to compare prices because we do that for you in one place where you know you’re getting the best deal.