@babyPeter: What art of the world are you in?
I have built a solution to fill a gap and you are welcome to partake if you are interested.
feel free to pm me.
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Originally Posted by mlseim
I see one problem with your idea ...
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I see several serious issues.
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The businesses in your area won't have the time to keep going to your site and editing the accomodations of their businesses ... especially hotels or motels.
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You'll discover that your site will never have current (or valid) information.
That means, you'll be doing all of the site updates, and that won't last very long.
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Absoutely correct mlseim. Tourism is my area for the past 10 years and the OP's stated plan is unfortunately a few years past its time;
if any income stream is hoped for OR the OP wants to provide critical mass of information to the user, they will have to do all the work with regard to listings. And most accommodation won't pay for listings because they can get a booking forst (from other sites) and they pay those companies for having actually got them the booking.
As for my quotes: real time booking info is where it is at right now and the plan suggested is so frought with delays that info will be inaccurate and therefore lose the trust of the visitor very quickly. The businesses won't update the info because it adds another cost to their business - one which they do not need to suffer, in order to gain sufficient bookings.
And the ability for you to do the updates will still have serious delays (losing the trust of the visitor and discrediting the site), not to mention the difficulty of contacting every business to see what new bookings they got since you last updated them. They will get fed up with you calling.
And should anyone expect a business to provide such information when there would be many people trying to get it from them, filling up their day with phone calls or emails, for them to have to repeat the process those numerous times? I don't think so!
So moving on to the listings site idea; what would set the site apart from the many other that provide listings and which have a low take up rate because to subscribe, it is only worthwhile (for the accommodation providers), if they actually get business.
There is a clear disconnect between listings and achieved business so they won't do so. That is why they don't pay at all for listings with the bigger sites, because they get bookings for no outlay. They are mostly content to pay from the income received from a booking so in all cases with the big sites, no matter the so-called discounts, there is still a fee paid to the booking site by the accommodation provider of between 12% and 40%.
bazz