Haggld

Unsold hotel rooms are one of the biggest untapped assets in hospitality, with an estimated 10% to 35% of all hotel rooms going unoccupied every year and being absorbed as an operating expense for the hotel.

Strategies such as dynamic pricing, last-minute deals, and partnerships with Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) can help optimise the revenue from these unsold rooms. However, OTAs like Booking.com, dominate the market and charge hotels high commission fees of between 15% and 30% on bookings, which is further compounded by rate parity clauses that restrict hotels from maximizing their revenue potential.

Defining the problem
How Might We: From our early user research, we found that the client experience for hotels making use of OTAs is not always very good, with hotels often having to deal with high commission fees and a lack of support. We wanted to make sure that our approach would benefit both the user/guest as well as the hotel, so we crafted How Might We statements for both.  

Task analysis and user flows: We conducted a task analysis to understand the steps each user would take in the booking process. Additionally, we started mapping out user flows to outline how the complete processes for both clients and customers would look.

Although many of these seem obvious in hindsight, the thing I’ve enjoyed most about this project is how much I’ve learnt along the way and how much I’m continuing to learn as we go.

Aim at iterating, not perfection
Probably the biggest lesson for our team has been learning the importance of getting it done, not perfect. Looking back we’ve all reflected on how its taken us too long to get to the point we’re at now. But we’ve starting to learn to let things go and be perfectly imperfect.

Keep it lean
There were times when we were responsible for scope creep on our MVP. We had to learn to simplify and save the shiny new features for later, once we've validated that they're actually needed.

Stepping up vs Stepping back
Sometimes you need to jump in and wear all the hats even if a task isn't in your wheelhouse of skills, but sometimes you need to step back and trust in the expertise of the team. We've had to learn when to do both.
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Document everything
Whilst we were already believers in the value of documentation, we had to learn to be more deliberate in documenting our decisions plus the reasons for doing something a certain way, so we didn't end up having the same conversation 3 months later when we forgot why.

Be aligned
Since we are a distributed team, having regular check-ins and a clear goal helps to keep us all on the same page. We also realised the importance of having a well-defined idea of what success looks like to us and what metrics we aim to achieve in order to get there.
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Get involved
The startup environment is vast, and one that none of us were very familiar with. Getting involved with accelerators, joining startup AMAs or local startup hubs, attending events, talking to people who know the landscape better and even just familiarising ourselves with the lingo has really helped us get a better understanding of the industry.