TripBAM Promises Best Hotel Rates for Travelers

TripBAM is a relatively new website that monitors hotel reservations and changes them automatically if the rate goes down.

It creates a cluster of hotels in the area where the customer wants to stay. As rates drop, the customer receives an email offering a less expensive price.

TripBAM will shop rates until the day of check in. TripBAM works in conjunction with a corporation’s travel management company to shop bookings in bulk.

Companies can pay on a per-shop basis or rates can be established upon the savings tripBAM delivers. Individual travelers do not have to pay for tripBAM services.

We sat down with Steve Reynolds, president of tripBAM, to discuss how the site works.

When was the company founded and why?

The company was started in April and it really was kind of based on a conversation we had when I was at a board meeting in D.C. around a guy that always seemed to have the best hotel rates in the city.

He said an assistant would shop across a bunch of hotels and as the rates would change she would cancel and rebook him. He just really didn’t know where he was going to stay up until a couple of days before he left on the trip. He didn’t really care as long as he had a really good rate. And we started thinking about it and whether we could automate this.

Then we went and purchased a bunch of rates. You can buy historical rates from lots of different companies and we did some analysis to see how often rates fluctuate and if you have clusters of two, three, four or10 hotels would you find significant amount of savings a high percentage of the time.

Once we were able to answer that question with a positive yes, that’s when we invested the money to build the company.

How do you distinguish yourself from an OTA?

We are kind of the opposite of an OTA. If you go to the major online travel agencies it seems like their mission in life is to sell you a nonrefundable merchant deal.

It might be a merchant rate because that’s where they make most of their margin and most of their profit and most cases most of their revenue. TripBAM puts in a cluster of x number of hotels and shops every day. If you do that you will save significantly more than this upfront discount that you may have gotten from one of those online travel agencies.

How exactly does tripBAM work?

Book a room and we’ll use that as a reference point or starting point. We’ll create a cluster for you if you want or you can create your own if you like.

And then we’ll shop across them every day. Eighty percent of the time we’re going to find savings, and the average savings is going to end up being $40 to $50 a night.

You just decide whether you want it or not. It’s pretty simple.

Who’s using tripBAM?

We’re very heavy on the corporate and managed travel side, the business-to-business side, so to speak. Corporations have woken up to the value of this and how it works so much better than their negotiated contracts in a lot of cases.

So some major companies and the larger travel agencies are now signing up for the service.

We’re talking to every mega travel agency on the planet and are in the process of implementing them as fast as they can come up on the system.

How are hotel companies reacting to tripBAM?

The hotel reaction to the product has been kind of an interesting case study all on its own. The initial reaction was, ‘Oh my god, you’re going to really mess with our RevPAR and all the work we put in to try to maximize the hotel revenue.’

After a discussion with them they sort of figured there’s a lot of value to the product and to the hotel brand because we allow the agency and the company to put in their preferred chains and their preferred properties. We can really shift share and drive more market share to a hotel.

We allow hoteliers and property managers to access the system and they can see travelers who have put their hotel in a cluster but they’re staying somewhere else.

And I can tell that property manager, ‘You need to offer this guy a rate of $149 and if you do we’ll present it to the traveler and nine times out of 10 they’ll accept it and we’ll move that booking to you at that point.’

It creates a way for them to increase their profit margins because otherwise they’d give that inventory to a Priceline or Expedia -- and they’d give up 30 to 40 percent of the rate.

How’s business?

The best way to put it is it’s booming. We’re drinking from a fire hose, mostly on the business-to-business side. We haven’t really gone aggressively after the consumer side yet. We plan on doing that probably second quarter of 2014. We’ve got some Web site enhancement we want to make.

We’ve got a mobile app in the work and so on. But on the business-to-business side we’re just implementing them just as fast as we possibly can. It’s going just surprisingly well.

Follow Claudette Covey on Twitter @claudettecovey.