Booking Technologies, an online hotel aggregator that provides a marketplace for Hotel rooms in Ethiopia, is set to launch its platform. The hotel booking service offers a convenient destination where people can discover, reserve, and list hotel rooms.
The platform which is called Room will be accessible via an app, website, and call center. Room enables users to discover the nearest hotel rooms alongside their price, type of rooms, and services they want to get with alternative payment solutions.
Natnael Mekonnen, CEO of Booking Technologies said, “We are excited to announce our platform Room.et, that will be fully available by the end of March, an online booking platform that provides a seamless and hassle-free hotel booking experience for users. ”
Users are able to provide reviews on the Hotels they have used and are also able to view recommendations given to hotels they are looking for during their search process.
“Our app enables you to discover the nearest hotel rooms with a filtered price. The key factor where Room.et plays a major role is in making the transaction cycle shorter. In the hospitality industry, where you always have various touch-point with the customer, Booking Technologies has focused on creating a highly efficient, easy-to-use mobile application for the customer. The company managed to develop an application that allows customers to book a room in simple three steps. In the first step, you search your query, based on which the application comes up with several suggestions in the locality. The second step is to choose from the room type, choose date and number of rooms, and lastly, just a confirmation click to reserve.”
Booking technologies designed a simple business model to work with Hotels. It provided owners to follow basic standards of service, features, staff, pricing, security, and then lists them on web portal and application.
Natnael added, “What triggered us to start this business was the non-existence of local OTA ( Online Travel Agency ) like Booking.com in Ethiopia. Then when we further studied the market and the result was shocking. We discovered that Ethiopia loses millions of dollars as a commission fee for OTA’s like Expedia, and Booking.com ”
This market opportunity for local players made the company be more interested in the hospitality industry and, started to do more market research using a feasibility study grant secured from Finnovation Ethiopia 2019 that was funded by Zemen Bank. After the completion of the feasibility study, Booking Technologies discovered trust and predictability of services as main challenges in the hotel booking experience and an opportunity to fill that gap through an online platform.
After the launch at the end of the month, Room.et plans to include rental houses and apartments in addition to hotel rooms.
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