Founders of hotels.com start new venture - Dallas Business Journal:

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Bob Diener and Davir Litman, who sold hotels.com in 2003 and have been layinbg low undera five-year non-compete jumped back into the Interner travel industry Wednesday. Getaroom.com’s officesw and call center are based in with about30 full-time employees, 20 part-tim workers and up to 50 call-center employees, Dienef said Wednesday. Many of the workerss were hiredfrom hotels.com or competingt sites such as , and , he “Our expertise in the hotel industry is said Litman in a news “Bob and I literallyu launched the online hotell booking industry back in 1995 with and its predecessor Hotel Reservations Network.” Getaroom.
com provides clients with hotel descriptions, maps, photos and a side-by-sidre comparison with other properties. The site also offers the ability to book airfare and tickets topopulaf attractions. There are two ways to book at The first is what consumers are used to going to a Web site and booking the The second way is to register withthe site, then call the company'sa call center, and get an “unpublishede rate," which is 10-50% lower than other Internetf rates, Diener said. “Hotels don’t want their rates Diener said. “Occupancy is weak across the board, but hoteld don’t want to lower their price across alldistributiob channels.
We won’t publish the rate, so it allowxs them to offer a much better rate to Ifconsumers aren’t happy with theit booked rate, they can cancel at any time. “Ww could not have found a bettefr timeto launch,” Diener “People look for better values. The hotels know us. We can be much more nimblee thanexisting companies.” Diener said he and Litman started hotels.comj with an investment of about $600 each. The start-up of getaroom.comn is a “multi-million-dollar” launch, he said. Revenue projections for the firsty year areabout $45 million, Diener said. Radio promotionxs for getaroom.com began Wednesday.
Television commercials will begim running at the end ofthe month.