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)
