Blink and you’ll miss the change HotelTonight made to its hotel-booking app in a new version it released Friday.
Up at the top, it lists your city and the word “Tonight” above a list of hotels. Now, however, you can tap the word “Tonight” and change it to “Saturday.” Or “Sunday.” Or even “Thursday.”
HotelTonight is no longer requiring you to book a hotel tonight, in other words. It now lets you book a room up to seven days in advance.
That small change in an app’s interface could vastly increases the appeal of HotelTonight beyond the last-minute crowd. Like me: I’m a relentless planner, and the notion of arriving in a city without a hotel booked makes me grind my teeth.
HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank says he got much the same reaction from some investors he pitched on the company when he started it three years ago. Those ones didn’t end up writing checks, but he managed to scrape together $80 million from others who were more convinced of the app’s appeal.
He’ll need that money. HotelTonight’s Web-born competitors—sites like Expedia, Orbitz, and Priceline—have all jumped on the last-minute mobile bandwagon. Priceline’s Booking.com even came out with a copycat app called Tonight—which is no longer mentioned on Booking.com’s website, and hasn’t been updated in almost a year.
How will HotelTonight compete? HotelTonight COO Jared Simon said that the hotels whose rooms the company sells report getting more last-minute bookings from HotelTonight than the established online travel agencies. That comparison will get harder when HotelTonight’s vying for a wider range of bookings.
That leaves negotiating better discounts at high-end or unique hotels—and sometimes paying to lock in rooms in advance.
Buying up hotel inventory is a strategy that Expedia’s Hotels.com used to pursue but has largely abandoned, says former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford, now a partner at Technology Crossover Ventures and an individual investor in HotelTonight. As a private company, HotelTonight has more flexibility to take on such risk, Simon argued, than its publicly traded competitors.
For now, HotelTonight’s risk may be its customers’ reward. It’s offering a 10% discount in the form of HotelTonight credits for anyone who makes advanced bookings with the app through the end of October.
