GetGoing, a travel site founded in January 2012 that lets you find discounted flights has now moved into the market for hotels. The San Francisco-based startup, with backing from Y Combinator, Digital Sky Technologies, Lightbank and Data Collective, partnered with Expedia to get access to cheap rooms across 140,000 hotels worldwide.
“There’s a lot of competition in travel search,” said Alek Vernitsky, founder and CEO of GetGoing, listing off companies such as Expedia, Hipmunk, Travelocity, etc. “But we went back to the drawing board to find out what’s missing [for consumers].”
What GetGoing found was that consumers want a number of improvements, such as 1) faster search 2) good prices 3) clean and fast user experience, with few advertisements 4) robust map interface 5) ability to see which friends/colleagues lived in cities they were traveling to 6) ability to see which friends had traveled to those cities 7) rewards program that was simple to understand.
These features are currently added to the GetGoing experience. “By partnerhing with Expedia we can offer lower rates but improve on the customer experience [with the social components] and customer support,” said Vernitsky.
Here’s how it works. You type in where you want to go.
Then you get a list of hotels.
You can also see which friends live nearby or which friends have been there before.
Finally, a traveler can book the hotel through GetGoing, though the entire process is actually handled by Expedia. For this partnership, GetGoing gets a cut of the commission Expedia gets from the hotel rooms. The commission is close to 50/50, said Vernitsky. Depending on the hotel, the commission to Expedia can be 15% to 25%, said Vernitsky.
I first wrote about GetGoing back in March, when it first launched as a place to get a steeply-discounted airfare by choosing two destinations to book in order to get one. It was a way to get leisure travelers to book tickets. To date, the best marketing and distribution technique has been its “Invite a friends” program which gives someone a $50 travel credit for every friend that books a ticket. So far, it seems on average, those who share with friends, share with 200 to 300. And about 20% of tickets booked come from these referrals.
While Vernitsky was willing to share these details, he’s as secretive about the company’s traction as he is about how much GetGoing has raised.
Asked how many bookings have been conducted on the site, and Robb Henshaw, GetGoing’s VP of marketing, had this to say: “In just four months out of beta, we have millions of travel searches. Our conversion rates are high… Better than airline partners asked us to have.”
