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Idea

A platform where people can last-minute resell their already booked hotel rooms

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Vishal Chamling

Vishal Chamling Feb 05, 2021

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No need to ever cancel a booked hotel room due to last-minute changes. Instead, sell it to another person at the same cost or better than the refund price. 

We all know that we cannot get a refund at last-minute hotel room cancellations. There are a few things that bother me about this. First is that the room booked by me, if cancelled at the last minute, will most definitely be "resold" giving an opportunity to the hotel to take double rent. Sometimes, travel agents pocket the price with the same reason. ..last-minute cancellation.

How about creating a portal, site or app that the travellers can log on to and list their destinations, cancelled hotels, check in & check out details, number of rooms and the price they intend to release the rooms for. I know not everyone cancels their hotel room but there surely are many instances everywhere around the world every day due to delayed flights, travel plan changes and many other unavoidable circumstances. 

The community can grow as we have seen with every innovative way of travelling. This particular idea can help solve many last minute jitters, cancellation, refunds, travel pressures, etc. If it grows it can be applied to just about any aspect of travel.. including flight tickets.

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General comments

Shubhankar Kulkarni

Shubhankar Kulkarni3 years ago

No other platform lets you transfer your booked rooms. Maybe that tells you that it is difficult to manage such a thing or it is probably bad for business. Booked but vacant rooms may bring in good money and, hence, nobody wants to give you the transfer option. I found a platform that lets you resell event tickets - https://www.stubhub.com/sell. I don't think they have a limit on the number of tickets you can resell. Also, they provide you the range of ticket prices (that other sellers have quoted) for your event. You can choose your price. The platform charges you a small fee only if the tickets get sold on the platform.

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Vishal Chamling

Vishal Chamling3 years ago

Shubhankar Kulkarni Thanks for the stubhub link. It seems like a great platform to get back "the almost lost" money. This made me smile. I hope they can take the game further in the future and put reigns around hotel and airline industries too! 

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Darko Savic

Darko Savic3 years ago

Shubhankar Kulkarni the harder the problem, the higher the potential. If nobody does it for a reason (hotels not wanting to go along) this is all the more reason why hotels that do go along would stand out from the crowd.

If you can get the people to prefer those that do over those that don't, the hotels will proudly wear the platform's badge and start growing in numbers.

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Shubhankar Kulkarni

Shubhankar Kulkarni3 years ago

Great idea Vishal Chamling ! Here is a feature that I think the platform should have. People may book multiple rooms and then rent them to someone else during the peak tourist seasons. This will increase the cost of the room and they may gain some extra cash. This can also happen privately outside of the platform. For example, I may buy 5 rooms in a hotel and start a small business of my own. I can ask people to pay the rent (as asked by the hotel) on the platform and pay me the extra amount using some other means. To avoid that, I thought of having a limit on the maximum active (having a future date) rooms a person can hold on the platform. But then again, a person can have multiple accounts. There should, therefore, be a stringent personal identification system while creating an account on the platform.

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Darko Savic

Darko Savic3 years ago

Hi Vishal Chamling, welcome:) This sounds like a pretty cool idea. One downside I can think of - some hotels would try to prevent this from happening. I had such an experience with Mariott in Ghent - they wouldn't let me pass on the reservation to another person. It seemed illogical to me why they wouldn't unless they didn't care about their customers. They were fully booked because of a conference so they knew they would have sold all rooms even if I end up canceling and paying anyway. It might have been a case of "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".☺️ 

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