Real world services become much more efficient when paired with Internet-based search and booking platforms. Today, event venues, hotels, airlines, restaurants and other businesses can build their own booking applications with software from various vendors. And OpenTable has done a good job creating a bookings portal for restaurants. Skype Prime and Ether are two good services that let phone-based vendors book, charge and perform their services online.
But no one has created a distributed bookings platform that can easily be plugged into individual businesses’ websites (without any programming knowledge), as well as yellow page and other local business sites. Once this platform exists, consumers will have a much easier way of booking everyday services (think tennis lessons, dentist appointments, hairdresser appointments, massages, cooking course, etc.). The potential market is millions of daily transactions.
At least two companies are racing to be the first startup to do exactly that, and help businesses integrate their services online.
Genbook
San Francisco/Australia based Genbook, founded by Rody Moore, raised $2.2 million from Neo Technology Ventures last year to build its product.
There is little information about Genbook on the site, but a press release on the funding mentioned above says they are building a “pay-per-booking” product to allow local businesses to capture online bookings in real-time. The product will be distributed through online directories and local search engines, and businesses will pay a fee per booking.
Libersy
There is much more information available about Amsterdam-based Libersy. The company, which is relocating to silicon valley, has been in stealth mode for the last year and will launch a pilot beta in Europe in May. The target public launch is Q3 2007. They’ve raised $500,000 in angel funding to date.
Founder and CEO Karin Loeffen let me poke around on their development site this afternoon and gave me an overview of the service. Libersy is building a central portal for businesses to create a profile and enter relevant information about their service (category, description, pricing, keywords/tags, etc.). The design is still raw but they’ve nailed the functionality, which includes good use of Ajax to minimize page views. Once they are in the Libersy system, they can add a “book this” button to their website (see screen shot) which links to a mini-booking page. The company will also give an embeddable code to service providers and allow bookings to be made directly from their websites.
The service will also be distributed through search engines and local business directories, and via the main Libersy services portal. Users will be able to search for service providers by location and pricing. Libersy will also encourage user ratings and feedback of service providers, creating an “ebay feedback” type of system (this is also a good potential partnership for Rapleaf).
Libersy will also assist providers in taking credit card and paypal payments for services. They plan to charge a small monthly fee to providers, and/or take a cut of transactions booked through their service.
The company is preparing to close a Series A round of funding.
I think that many underestimate the differences in different reservation environments. At first glance making reservations seem to be the same in all businesses but when you dig deeper it becomes clear that each business has its own needs.
We’ve been working on our platform for about a year now and started off making it general, but since we are dealing with restaurant reservations we quickly needed to make some adjustments. However, our base platform could be used for appointments that you mention above. What’s left is to package it nicely to be able to distribute the system to different reservation environments.
Regards,
Anders Fredriksson
It’s obviously a potentially huge market for whoever figures it out. If it were easy it’d already be done, I do think it’s do-able. Not by me, but by smart people.
I look forward to someone doing it and doing it right, the landscape for a lot of places I’ve wanted reservations at has been bleak for years. A plug-in solution would make a lot of people very very happy.
I’ve found out that the key in this type of venture is not making online bookings easy for customers – that’s relatively easy.
The key is to make the system easy enough for the service-providers. As Anders already mentioned, there’s an unimaginable difference between managing a system for tennis and a system for aerobiks.
Getting all these different businesses to switch from paper to online is a really hard job.
As for the “pay for booking” scheme, I really don’t think this is going to work. The businesses are not interested in paying so they will probably not encourage their own customers to switch from phone to online.
A monthly fee will make them do just that and the service takes off usually just within weeks.
TourCMS is working along this direction and has been live for a few years.
The complexity of travel reservations is massive and should not be underestimated. But if you can do travel, you can do other date / time based services.
Alex
Anders and Henk are correct. At 5pm.co.uk we do restaurant bookings.
Libersy use the example of hairdressers.
The differences between the two are huge!
Ronnie Somerville
Alex, I agree that if you manage to do travel right, you are fit to do all the others. But this doesn’t mean you don’t have to program a totally new software for beauty-salons
Any template based software which gives leeway to Businses can be profitably harnessed by the business.
http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com
This will indeed be a huge challenge. These kind of fundings are always risky for anyone. However, I think with enough planning and correct structures, they can pull it off and succeed. It definitely isn’t for everyone and failure potential is high.
OhCash
I feel like it’s deja vu all over again. When we started Xpiron in March 2000, there were many well-funded “horizontal” scheduling startups, including Xtime, TimeTrade, and others. We believed then, and still believe now, that on-line scheduling has to be verticalized in order to be successful. It may be possible to build an on-line scheduling engine with the flexibility / configurability to handle multiple reservation domains, but it would be a huge amount of work – and then you still have to go to market in each domain.
Within our target market of health clubs alone, we have built five distinct types of services, and each type has its own idiosyncracies in terms of configurability, business rules, etc. And each of our customers needs to set the rules and parameters to match their business policies. So even within a single industry / vertical, there can be huge variability.
In addition, asking consumers to pay per booking is a tough sell in most target verticals. That approach has worked in travel, and concert and movie tickets, but note how opentable.com doesn’t charge the consumer to make a reservation – the restaurants are footing the bill.
We believe that a more effective way to make money in this space is with media – deliver targeted ads to the users who are self-booking. Enhance the media platform to allow the businesses to cross-market additional services to their customers, and to enable the businesses’ customers to interact with each other, ala myspace / facebook / etc., and you’ll build a deep and sticky footprint in the vertical you’re in.
Kevin #9
Yes – you are right. It is very verticalised and I don’t see that going away anytime soon. If you don’t focus on what you do well – you could easily cover a number of areas less strongly – leaving you open to competition on a number of fronts. At least if you focus on a vertical you know what the needs are of your customers, and have some idea who you are competing with.
Alex
I hope this works, because we’ll be at the front of the line to use it. But I think that’s still several years off.
A logical pre-cursor to this service is simply widespread adoption of VOIP lead generation for local search.
Don’t try to change user behavior. A hair salon is already used to answering the phone to take reservations. Fine. So, where’s the little phone logo embedded in Google or Yahoo’s paid listings where I simply click on the icon, call the hair stylist, and make my reservation?
I don’t pay for a phone call (win), hair salon gets a new customer (win), and Google gets yet another revenue stream (win).
This is why Google, not eBay, should have bought Skype.
The infrastructure required for a general purpose booking system is way to high for this to gain traction in the next couple of years. I can see it working 10 years out from now.
It sounds to me like they want to be like a MasterCard offering “distributed” payments instead of a store maintaining their own credit card. How long did it take that business plan to take off? Plus selling credit card services is far far easier than bookings where there’s N number of variances per individual company and M ways that it could get screwed up.
They’re better off marking this to large chains saying that they will provide the backend services to their restaurant reservations (say like Wolfgang Puck’s), pizza orders (Pizza Hut), and events. But ticketmaster has that last one sewn up. Local operations like Restaurants ToGo offer food delivery.
I wish them the best of luck. Seems like something that would fit in nicely with Amazon’s message queuing service.
Travel reservations are extremely complex to do well, especially when multiple components like air, hotel, car or rail have to be combined for a total trip package. The leading online travel companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past seven or so years to perfect this type of dynamic packaging and pricing. It’s still an unrealized dream for online travel shoppers. It is easier for independent suppliers to offer than for intermediaries.
I see an opportunity for using these types of services for local destination based services like attractions. restaurants, museums, other activities. Destination websites need easier to integrate systems as they don’t usually have the tech or financial resources to build the functionality from scratch.
I can tell you from first hand experience that this type of venture really is a tough go. From what i have learned so far with my own startup businesses don’t want to pay for something that they already perceive they’re getting for free.
But all the best to both startups, local and integrating online with offline i think is the biggest opportunity on the web.
A small company in Foster city – Reardon Commerce – seems to be doing this pretty well.
I completely agree that it is difficult to generalize online reservations across vertical markets. Although we have built Brownbook to be available to multiple different industries, we have started out with photographers in mind. We have people using our services to schedule everything from massage therapy sessions to equipment rental to cheerleading tutoring to tech service appointments, but the more generalized you become, the less you can serve any one group. I sympathize with Kevin who has built five different services for health clubs alone. As people become more specialized, they look for more specialized solutions to both serve their needs and to differentiate them from their competitors. If you’re not careful, then you end up with bloatware and you serve no one.
“Libersy is building a central portal for businesses to create a profile and enter relevant information about their service ” …”stealth mode for the past year” I can’t believe how they’ve managed to keep this thing under wraps!…I hadn’t heard a thing…
I believe that one of the key issues in making a cross-vertical-domain general purpose reservation system is providing an open robust basic platform. The tricky part is making the complete system for each market.
Due to the complexity of different markets I think that such a platform would basically have to be so basic that it is not that much help anyways.
Feel free to contact me to discuss this further. Or we could take it to the forums.
//Anders
I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. I hate calling a barber or salon to setup an appointment.
If I could just search Google (or some other site) and quickly locate a service and price, I’d definitely use it. Since I’m the customer, and I’m always right, services should be expected to implement it. Even better, strike a deal with cellular providers to allow people to instantly book things via their phone.
Rather than a full-scale reservation system, why not a service-oriented site? If I want a haircut, I search salons and prices. If I need plumbing, I search up Mike Arrington (the plumber) or the one with the lowest price & highest ranking.
@Phil Dewey:
Rearden isn’t quite doing the same thing…. and they’re far from little. Over $100M in funding, major backers (think AMEX), etc.
Very interesting post – but awareness of these tools is just as big a problem as building them.
check out golfnow.com for a very effective solution for a fragmented industry of owners.
I agree you could leapfrog with the right solution but trying to get these backward businesses to adopt is another thing
disclosure – I am an investor
Best of luck to Rody Moore and the guys at GenBook. Another Australian startup called bookingangel.com founded by Dean McEvoy also has some runs on the board but is concentrating on the local restaurant market.
@ Ed Buchholz & @Phil Dewey:
Rearden used to be called Talaris and before that was called Gazoo… $100mm raised shows you the size of the problem when trying to connect an average user with a typical low-tech, low-tech business. The past 10(?) years are littered with start-up trying to do this.
Thanks for the mention Tech yob. We have been doing this in the restaurant industry for almost 3 years now and will shortly be expanding industries and launching in different countries
We have a simple solution which has been working well with real customers and real revenue (we have managed to bootstrap it up till now). Web users want to stay on the web to make their appointments and businesses are used to answering the phone rather than migrating to a new system for managing bookings. Our solution is simple see more at our website http://www.bookingangel.com
Getting businesses to pay will involve yellow pages style directories changing their business model. Charging a business $X per booking is much easier to sell than $1000 per year for a listing just as pay per click has taken off with google, pay per booking will be even bigger as it will crack the massive small business market and the value of a booking is much higher than a click and easily measurable by the businesses who receive them.
Anyone interested in finding out more. You can contact me at dean@bookingangel.com
Wow this is very interesting i never thought that technology would evolve this fast
http://WWW.IHATEBULL.com
Dean McEvoy, Bookingangel is not in real-time. It’s probably fine with restaurants, but try the same thing with hairdressers and you’re done. Would be much easyer just to call them.
Charging a business $x for a booking is fine as long as you get them new customers. If you can somehow manage to do that, then it might work.
Travel has obviously been one of the most successful areas of commerce on the web – in fact who books an air ticket offline these days? But even then there is room for vertical specialization as comments above allude to.
For instance just look at a very specialized company like http://www.hostelworld.com who are very Web 1.0, very focussed and probably earn more than all the ‘06 web 2.0 start ups combined…
Just enabling is not enough – as Henk says you must offer new customers to be relevant.
you need to look at onforce
I agree with Howard. Availability of the system is one thing, adoption and action on it by industries that are typically hesitant to jump on, trust, and operationally find the time to use new tech is another. Full disclosure from me, we are doing something similar to Golfnow in the ski space with Liftopia http://www.liftopia.com
At Escapia (www.escapia.com) and Adventure Central (www.adventurecentral.com), we’re building booking services for vacation rentals and adventure travel, respectively. Escapia is the leading web-hosted solution in the vacation rental sector, and now powers over $100 million per year in annual bookings. Adventure Central is growing nicely, establishing a very strong presence in outdoor adventure bookings. (Disclosure, I’m chairman of the former, and a director at the latter.)
I can see a horizontal booking play working well for one-off, individual resources, and think Cameron Yuill and friends are onto something at GenBook. (Anyone remember XTime.com? That was an attempt to do this as well.)
However, if your vertical has very specific needs, often around accounting and/or customer service and/or distribution networks, once you get beyond about 10 resources, it either needs a rich API for add-on information or a full-blown vertical solution.
Regardless, I applaud TechCrunch for finally recognizing this important and growing sector. I believe strongly that we’ll be seeing the demise of classified-ad-funded style verticals, and the rise of pay-per-booking services such as these in the next generation of the web, and I wrote about this trend here: http://stevemur...oming_demi.html
Hi Steve i would like to talk to you about opportunities to take advantage of the vacation rental market in Mexico my email is ceo@salomonjabez.com i would love to talk to you about some possible business opportunities.
Luis Garcia
@Mary Q. @ Ed Buchholz & @Phil Dewey
Rearden Commerce is targeting a different audience in comparison to some of these websites. Rearden is building a vertical for business travel including book hotel, car rental, restaurants as a package instead of targeting ordinary consumers.
WebReserv.com is a startup launched for this particular purpose – to provide a general reservation platform for small- to large businesses. We managed to crack the code on building an effective high-performance reservation engine that can be used to book anything regardless of duration of the reservation.
We also provide a booking component that easily can be added to existing websites.
Best regards,
Martin Israelsen
Founder
http://www.webreserv.com
Here’s a similar service in the Bay Area:
http://www.hourtown.com
You can create a “business profile” which is kind of like a Myspace for small businesses. Customers can then book appointments from your profile page and you have a cool little calendar/contact manager for free.
Finally an article about web based (non-GDS) booking services. For a long time now I’ve been feeling like this type of booking service might not be sexy enough for most Web 2.0 sites.
We have been developing a distributed online booking solution for over two years now. The Sentias Booking Server was just released from Beta on March 1, 2007. It took thousands of hours and a year in Beta with over a hundred tour operators and accommodations providers to come up with a solution that works well and provides lots of flexibility for growth and change. The one comment we got from most travel related companies is that you absolutely cannot build a single system that will fit everyone’s needs. Which is why we branched our application into modules for specific verticals like tours and attractions, accommodations, hotel/flight packages, and a custom trip module. I don’t doubt that we’ll have to build additional modules in the future for other verticals like car/equipment rental and appointments. The point being you can dress up your app in whatever fancy Web 2.0 design you want and produce a slick little video to promote it, but if there is no collaboration with actual market users (and that takes time), then the product will miss the mark.
By the way, feel free to try out the Booking Server. It is live, working, has a free and premium service, a fully built XML API (ready for integration), and you can sign up now to try it. Also, the pricing is readily available on the site, so there’s no guessing about how much it costs.
Kind Regards,
Stephen Joyce
President
Sentias Software Corp.
http://www.sentias.com
p.s. we love feedback, no matter how critical, so send it our way.
Distributed scheduling systems are the natural progression in a Web 2.0 world. Just as we saw scheduling solutions evolved off vendor’s PCs and into end-user’s browsers, we will see scheduling systems evolve away from being middle-ware biz-op tools to become marketing channels.
A recurring theme in this string (and rightly so) asks, “Should you build vertical or go horizontal?” It all depends: Will the vertical support development? Are you targeting users or end-users? Are you providing managerial efficiencies or driving sales?
A horizontal strategy is a more viable approach for extremely fragmented service sectors. It gives the developer an opportunity to spread costs and revenue opportunities across verticals. Above all, these independent service providers need clients and cash flow. The soft skills and personalized services that give them a competitive advantage in their markets cannot be easily automated, but perhaps their sales process can. A horizontal strategy helps nullify the negative effects of a fragmented industry by creating greater market liquidity. It also extends the value proposition beyond the service provider to their clients. The sizable challenge with this approach is convincing vendors to choose a marketing channel over their unique business process. You are asking many of them to choose marketing over their self-identity.
At one end of the continuum, you find extremely fragmented markets with low volume and low ticket items. I have an affinity for these micro businesses who compete in massive grassroots service sectors that look like minnow filled lakes. As the smallest of small businesses, they are not well documented. They are too expensive to track. They often have multiple, unique, or poorly defined business processes that if mirrored pragmatically could institutionalize as many of their bad habits as it would best practices. These micro businesses and sole proprietors are experts in preforming a specific service. They don’t have the time or support to do much else. As a result, they may lack the business and IT skills to fully leverage a scheduling tool or to fully value your product. A vertical strategy within these markets would mean that you would have to offer more customized, more robust, turn-key solutions with more support at lower price points.
At the other end of the spectrum, you find unfragmented markets. Vertical builds are most attractive for unfagmented markets where larger businesses or government entities dominate a service marketplace or have internal scheduling needs. These well documented ‘big fish’ have established industry standards, business processes, or support systems that can become more efficient with a scheduling tool. They offer clearer specs, cheaper development, and the willingness and ability to pay. They may even fund your development. Early on, these low lying fruit were wisely picked.
In the center, you find moderately fragmented to highly fragmented markets with either high volume or large ticket items. They too are well documented, and their hearty revenue streams enable them to pay for support service that better drive their manicured business models. They can afford and may choose a vertical solution.
I am a service marketing entrepreneur who founded a company in 2003 that researches and develops business and IT solutions for independent service providers and their clients. As a result, I launched http://www.selfbookit.com in January 2007. Self Book It is a horizontal marketplace for appointment-based services. — Jason Howell
Here is a link that takes you to a page on my website that gives brief descriptions of various salon massage equipments.
Checkfront is currently running in Beta at http://www.checkfront.com. It’s a
Distributed online Availability, Reservation and Booking platform in a cloud based environment. We’re really excited about and in would love some feedback.
There have been found even what are called say, on ‘multiple alleles’, that is to say, two or more different ‘versions’ and ‘readings’ -in addition to the normal, non-mutated one -of the same place in the chromosome code; that means not only two, but three or more alternatives in that particular one ‘locus’, any two of which are to each other in the relation ‘dominant-recessive’ when they occur simultaneously in their corresponding loci of the two homologous chromosomes. ,
Medium to large companies in different industries wanting to use online scheduling will never use a stock booking system. And the software is often hard to use as it has “everything” they think they need.
But most small businesses just want to have their schedule online so their clients can make appointments. So it doesn’t have to have all the bell and whistles to make everybody happy.
We run a appointment scheduling service with that in mind, so it’s very simple and our clients like it that way.
/Daniel The Scheduling Wizard
Does anyone use any online scheduling service?
What do your clients think?