ByHours.com allows you to book hotel rooms in 3, 6, 12, 24, 36 and 48 hour packs, and decide your hotel check-in and check-out time. Moreover, ByHours.com sells meeting rooms by packs of 2, 4 and 8 hours, to increase their revenue and offer the customer a flexible product. ByHours.com is introducing the pay-per-use model in hotel industry.
Founded in March 2012 in Barcelona, ByHours.com is one of the startups of the year in Spain. It is the winner of several awards for being an innovative project that has introduced a new business model in the tourism sector, and for its growth, as in just 2 years there are already 28 people working in its offices.
ByHours.com is an on-line platform and is also a mobile application, which allows the customer to choose their hotel check-in and check-out time, and book the hours they need, in packs of 3, 6, 12, 24, 36 and 48 hours. On one hand, it offers the customer flexibility and payment according to use, so that they can book a hotel only for the time they need it, always based on fair Price. On the other hand, it allows hotel operators to make their rooms more profitable, as they can sell them more than once per day, and this increase their RevPAR.
ByHours.com is already working with over 600 hotels all over Spain from the best national and international hotel chains, such as H10, Eurostars or Meliá. Now, having consolidated the business model in Spain, it will open its way into internationalization and will operate in the UK, Germany, and Italy within the first and the second quarter of 2014. Actually, ByHours.com is operating in London, with 10 own recruited hotels.
In this internationalization stage, ByHours.com has added experience and talent to its team, and included a new signing: Amine Saoudi, former CFO from Splendia.com, who has a great career path in opening new markets.
ByHours.com is intended for all those situations where a hotel is only needed for a few hours, and so it offers hotels near train stations, ports, and airports, in order to avoid waiting; hotels near congress centers, urban centers, and highway rest areas; and also hotels near hospitals for all patients or accompanying persons needing a few hotel hours in order to rest, but without moving too far off from the health center.
In relation to daily hotel operations, ByHours.com provides an internal tool that allows them to decide the price, hour packs, and check-in hours they want to sell, as well as connect with their PMS-Channel Manager, to make management easier and faster. The hotel operator decides at all times what they want to sell, how, and at what price, and ByHours.com receives a direct commission from the hotel operator, as the customer always pays at the hotel.
The key to ByHours.com resides in that it is not only a site aimed at the final client, but also aimed at B2B. Thus, it has three business lines: Travel, Healthcare, and Leisure. These business lines allow us to work with important partners from different sectors, with ByHours.com being the only hotel accommodation-by-hours distributor. ByHours.com offers integration tools, such as for example White labels, which are completely customizable, allowing each partner to design its hotelby-hours search engine with their corporate image, and offer their customers an added value and a complementary product.
In the travel line, ByHours.com is working with the number 1 in online flight sales, the Odigeo Group. eDreams is already selling hotel rooms by hours in Spain on its website. It is a very ambitious agreement that upon internationalization, it will let us work with other Odigeo brands: Opodo, Travellink, and GoVoyages.
In this business line, ByHours.com also works with major industry leaders such as Pullmantur, Viajes Carrefour, or Grupo Areas. Within its Healthcare line, ByHours.com is working with hospitals all over Spain, which already offer accommodation by hours at their centers; this is also a product very much targeted towards health tourism. ByHours Healthcare also works with major insurance companies, which offer this service in their policies.
Finally, the Leisure line is designed to complement leisure situations, and therefore ByHours.com works with ticketing companies, and also in different actions with nightclubs, theaters, movie theaters, or special events, in order to offer a different and complementary service.
ByHours.com Mobile app
The ByHours.com app, which is free and available for Android and iOS, is the only one that offers the user the ability to book hotels in major hotel chains in the country, in packs of 3, 6, 12, 24, 36 and 48 hours, and decide the hotel check-in and check-out time. In addition, thanks to its geolocation system, the app lets us find the closest hotels to the point where the user is, and book in 3 easy steps: decide the city, hour pack, and chosen hotel check-in time. All this, in order to offer flexible bookings to the user:
Other important areas addressed were the impact social media and influencer marketing has had and how one manages to keep their brand and image on social as authentic as possible, whilst overcoming some of the fashion misconceptions in the region.
Fashion has definitely seen a major shift in the GCC over the last few years, moving away from being known as purely high end ‘fashion consumers’ to giving rise to some of the industry’s fashion game changers. Rabia Zargarpur is an example of such, becoming one of the first designers to showcase Modest Fashion ready-to-wear looks on mainstream runways and fashion shows.
A stand out take home message for all our guests would have to be that no designer ‘made it’ straight out of fashion school; brands like Tom Ford and Valentino all began at the bottom, working for others and building their story, and did not become successful overnight. The other key message was that there is no such thing as perfection – trial and error are key in all aspects of career and life, and if you don’t try you’ll never know!
The panel wrapped up at 11am and all guests enjoyed an hour long opportunity to network with each other and the speakers after the talk, with business cards and contacts exchanged at all levels. As always, the energy that built in the room was infectious and the advice shared invaluable.”
Our next Career Clinic will be held in collaboration with Mompreneurs ME at Life N One, Jumeirah, on April 23rd. To register your interest, email us at events@hopscotch.ae. 