Where to start..............

[S Isaac]

Okay, I have a few (what I think) are great ideas and some money to get if off the ground.

I'm thinking of setting up something similar to hotels.com or bookings.com but on a smaller scale for a smaller region, let's say for wales. I'd then be looking to buy up relevant domain names welsh-hotels hotels-in-wales etc etc but rather than have them all just 'point' to one site, I'd be looking to have them with some good content and linking to eachother. Am I right in thinking this will help push it up the ranks ? Also, having a good set of images with decriptions so that they can also be found if someone is looking at google images for hotels, castles, beaches etc.

So a few questions are:-
1. Can this be with some opensource (or cheap but good) software ?
2. Will this software allow the hotels to use it at their end to manage bookings so that my site shows 'real time' availability ? If not, how hard would it be to get my site and their systems to integrate ?
3. Have any of you ever done a project similar to this ? Any tips ?
4. I'd want to be able to take payments online and take a % or flat fee for each booking.
5. I'd want to capture customer details for future marketing.
6. I'd want a system that could manage all the deposits, bookings, payments, availability, cancellations, billing, payments etc etc as automated as possible.
7. How much do you think this would all cost (roughly) ? Are we talking £00's, £000's or £000,000's ?


I'm also looking at another project again on a smaller scale of something like rightmove.co.uk

Would want the same sort of thing, but for the letting/estate agent businesses instead of hotels.

Most of the domains I was thinking of are available but I don't want to register them if the project would simply cost me too much to do.

Thanks in advance............

 

[OldWelshGuy]

The Hotel thing is a real issue. I have until last year been involved in one such project for 3 years (sold out as it was eating time, and time is prescious to me) Well sold out is probably wrong as I still own 22% of it.

The problems you face are big, in that you are up against desitination marketing sites like visit wales, which is run by the Welsh Assembly government.

You touched on hotels having live information, but they simply don't have the time to manage them, as each time they let a room, they then have to update m,ultiple listings online (I did look into this and secured some funding also) .

Please don't take this the wrong way, but you appear to want to run before you can walk. Our site gobbled up the best part of £100,000 well in fact it was more than that all told. But most of that was spent in back end functionality to allow it to interact with various other sites.

Again, please don't be offended, but you say you have some great ideas, but what you have is an idea to copy sites that already exist.

If I were you I would look at things harder before diving in, else it could be an expensive dive.

 

[S Isaac]

Thanks for the prompt reply.

Wales was an example. I have a untapped market in mind and many of the hotels may not even be online so giving them a portal to do this is one of my selling points. I realise that costs could be huge, but I figure if I provide the complete system (allowing hotels to use it too) then integration would not be so much of a problem.

Do you mind if I ask what your site is ? You can PM me if you prefer. What sort of fee or % you charge per booking etc.

What about the estate agent idea again, giving them the platform but instead of a % of sales (which would be hard to track as people don't just pay for houses online) it would probably be a fee per lisitng or a monthly subscription.