Hopefully helpful critique regarding the business itself:
1. I'm not sure about Americans, but "lodging" translates very poorly for this Canadian. It's not that I don't understand it, it's just that people don't really use the word here. "Rooms" or "Beds" would be a better bet.
2. I'm questioning why I as a traveller would bother to "bid" on a room that I may know nothing about. Seems like a win for the hotelier, but a lose for me. I can stay at a hostel or hotel chain and have a reasonable expectation of what to expect. I can't do that at a B&B, but I can compare prices to get an idea of what would be up scale and what would be bargain basement. This site disables that, and brags about it. I really don't need to save $5 that badly.
About the process:
I think - humbly - that sometimes us geeks can get so caught up in the process of how we're building something that we lose sight of what it is we're actually building. This doesn't matter when you're making lego structures as a hobby, but it's completely relevant when you're trying to design a business.
How you do it is - in the end - largely irrelevant. Yes you can argue about productivity or the best way to get the most hours out of a day, but extremes aside it is not going to be what matters to your customer. I don't care if you used agile and got your product up in 10 hours or if it was a disastrous waterfall plan that needed to be redrawn 6 times and took 6 years to complete. I care about the product, and what it can do for me.
In this case (and I mean this respectfully) I get the impression that the process was the focus and the product was the afterthought. There's nothing wrong with that specifically, but it certainly shows through.
Thank you for reading the post. I must clarify that travelers are not bidding. Instead, the lodgings bid for the itineraries of the travelers.
Additionally, we, at LetMeGo, use the word "lodging" because we are not only limited to hotels, beds, or rooms. We also cover vacation rentals, tents, and pretty much any place where you can sleep. "Lodging", which is the abstraction of all these, is not a common word because most online services only offer one type of lodging: hotels, or rooms, or vacation rentals, etc. That, hopefully, will change, as more options equals more competition and lower prices.
>Instead, the lodgings bid for the itineraries of the travellers.
Ah, I see. That wasn't evident to me. The way it was described seemed to be that travellers were bidding on open rooms and highest bid won.
Your way is interesting, but I'm not sure what benefit it offers me as a traveller. In order to drive the service you'd need to create a market of travellers eager to provide the products to bid on. I'm having a hard time understanding why I would do that on the surface.
Also, I understand why you use the word lodging, I just don't think it fits. I need to know as a consumer exactly how I can benefit from your product. If I'm confronted with a word that I need to define, it delays my understanding of the product and increases the chance that I not use it.
Regardless, good luck to you. I wish you the best of successes.
1. I'm not sure about Americans, but "lodging" translates very poorly for this Canadian. It's not that I don't understand it, it's just that people don't really use the word here. "Rooms" or "Beds" would be a better bet.
2. I'm questioning why I as a traveller would bother to "bid" on a room that I may know nothing about. Seems like a win for the hotelier, but a lose for me. I can stay at a hostel or hotel chain and have a reasonable expectation of what to expect. I can't do that at a B&B, but I can compare prices to get an idea of what would be up scale and what would be bargain basement. This site disables that, and brags about it. I really don't need to save $5 that badly.
About the process:
I think - humbly - that sometimes us geeks can get so caught up in the process of how we're building something that we lose sight of what it is we're actually building. This doesn't matter when you're making lego structures as a hobby, but it's completely relevant when you're trying to design a business.
How you do it is - in the end - largely irrelevant. Yes you can argue about productivity or the best way to get the most hours out of a day, but extremes aside it is not going to be what matters to your customer. I don't care if you used agile and got your product up in 10 hours or if it was a disastrous waterfall plan that needed to be redrawn 6 times and took 6 years to complete. I care about the product, and what it can do for me.
In this case (and I mean this respectfully) I get the impression that the process was the focus and the product was the afterthought. There's nothing wrong with that specifically, but it certainly shows through.