Roomer, an Israel-based online travel marketplace start-up, announced yesterday that it is entering the hotel meeting space with the debut of Roomer Partner Network (RPN). According to Richie Karaburun, Roomer Travel's Managing Director, USA, RPN will act as an "asset recovery tool" and "cost mitigation product" that prevents attrition.
With RPN, meeting planners can post unused rooms from meeting room blocks free of charge on Roomer's website, which promotes and sells hotel rooms worldwide. If the unused room is sold via Roomer, the planner would be able to collect money for the room at the price listed (which they could choose), and Roomer would receive a 15 percent commission from the sale. If the room is not sold, there is no charge to the planner.
"Everyone's a winner," Karaburun told Successful Meetings at the 46th annual Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) convention in Los Angeles. "The planner wins because she avoids attrition. The hotel wins because they get a customer for that room. And the customers win."
The inspiration for developing RPN, Karaburun said, stemmed from the needs of planners themselves. "We started thinking about this when, a few months ago, we had two meeting planners come to us and ask us if they could use our service to avoid room block attrition for their respective meetings," he explained. "We realize that attrition is a real problem for planners, and technology can really help them with this. There's an estimated $8.6 billion lost ever year in the U.S. alone from rooms that are booked, paid for, and then not used."
Karaburun adds that RPN has already had a few early adapters in the past five months, and that some planners who have used it successfully sold their unused rooms.
While Roomer begins to court the meeting and incentive planner community by joining associations such as Meeting Professionals International (MPI) and the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), Karaburun says that they are also looking to enter the corporate travel space as well. "We think we can develop a dual partnership with corporate travel managers that's both supply and demand based," he said. For example, he noted, that companies or organizations that negotiate large room blocks with certain brands/properties could use Roomer to sell unused rooms that are already paid for. "We'll be a free solution to mitigate costs for everyone."
When asked if Roomer is directly competing with hotels, Karaburun said, "We're not a competitor to hotels; in the end, they have nothing to lose."