Building an Online Travel Company From Barcelona: Guillermo Gaspart, CEO of ByHours (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what you needed to build. You needed to build some software that would allow hotels to manage this process as well as users to make bookings in this mode because none of the OTAs would allow users to even do this at the moment.

Guillermo Gaspart: Exactly. We needed to build the software just to put it in the hotels and at the same time, build the website just to offer and sell to the users.

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first customer? Was it somebody from your personal network? Was it something that you were already involved in?

Guillermo Gaspart: Our first customer was a businessman. Even today, we have exactly the same type of customers – business people and travelers.

Sramana Mitra: This is on the consumer side?

Guillermo Gaspart: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What about the hotel side?

Guillermo Gaspart: Some hotels here in Barcelona were our friends.

Sramana Mitra: How many hotels did you launch this with in Barcelona?

Guillermo Gaspart: At the moment, we have 30 hotels in Barcelona.

Sramana Mitra: 30 hotels in Barcelona who were mostly from your friends’ network. On the consumer side, how did people find out that you were offering this?

Guillermo Gaspart: We made a press release just to offer this to their users.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about the operational side. It’s not just software for the hotels. The hotels have to have software to be able to manage bookings like this, but they also need to have some operational issues like cleaning and so forth to be able to operate in this mode.

What did you experience with the first 30 hotels that you went after in this mode? What did you experience in terms of getting this concept adopted with the early adopters?

Guillermo Gaspart: Our first approach to the hotels was talking about optimizing the empty rooms. They don’t need to clean the room in the afternoon because they’re not going to occupy these rooms during the night.

That’s why they just keep the room dirty until the next day once they have the housekeeping operation and everything. If they want to sell the same room twice in a day, then they need to adapt the housekeeping routine.

Sramana Mitra: They were willing to do that?

Guillermo Gaspart: They need to do it only if they want to sell twice in a day.

Sramana Mitra: With the 30 rooms in Barcelona, I take it that your revenue model is just a commission on the rooms that you book, right?

Guillermo Gaspart: Exactly. We charge a commission.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage is that?

Guillermo Gaspart: Just 15%.

Sramana Mitra: How far did you get with the 30 rooms and the first set of consumers who were using your services? What kind of revenue booking level did you reach?

Guillermo Gaspart: The first year was really low because we were more focused on trying to build the software, the website, and also the product. That’s why at the beginning, the number of bookings that we got was really low.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building an Online Travel Company From Barcelona: Guillermo Gaspart, CEO of ByHours
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