Puny Little Human

HotelTonight is changing the way I spend nights in New York and think about the long tail of local commerce

Usually when I am in New York City, I head out to Long Island and crash at my fiancé’s parents’ house in Roslyn and take the train or drive into the city the next morning. But there have been a few occasions when I just want to stay in the City and be spared the 1 to 1.5 hours commute into town.

I’ve used HotelTonight a handful of times and it has proven to be an incredibly powerful app to find cool new places to stay at affordable prices. The density of New York City and the wide availability of cool boutique hotels makes the app super useful. Each time I’ve used the app, I show up in the city without a reservation and am reasonably confident that I will be able to find something that is:

• Close to $100 a night.
• Near a subway station.
• Be an interesting experience - I would say that this has been the coolest part of HT.

Discovery is often talked about as a need around digital media: to be able to dive into the long tail.

However, there is also a critical problem for local merchants that exist in the long tail of physical locations. I would argue that this is actually the richest area of opportunity around mobile Internet and with multiple angles of attack. There are merchants in the long tail that offer amazing value or experience for money, but may underspend on promotion and location.

I never realized just how many boutique hotels there were out there in Manhattan. And staying at one can be a refreshing change of pace from the cookie cutter chains. I just stayed at Gild Hall Hotel in Downtown. There was leather and wood everywhere. Everywhere. They had this quirky and cool leather rhinoceros statue.

Yelp and Foursquare have been apps that facilitate local discovery. Ness is also tackling this problem. They are all powerful. I think the group buying model is the one that has the greatest opportunity for success if user acquisition costs can be controlled and load balancing for merchants can be solved.

HT is one that I have both used for discovery purposes, but also adds the benefit that I think are incredibly powerful:

• The hotels listed tended to be more boutiques and long tail.
• The proximity component is really strong, and not for the reason you would think. Because you can only book for a room in the evening at 12PM, you have to book for somewhere that you can get to within 1 day. I think constraining the map boundaries greatly enhances the apps intensity of discovery, particularly in a city like New York.
• They are going after a merchant where reservation and transacting are strongly tied to the discovery process. The beautiful “h” signing at the end of the process is a wonderful finishing touch.

I think there will be really amazing apps that look a lot like HT for other types of local points of interest. I think those will be where the thick revenue driven outcomes for startups will come.