
Boo.com is a new, young travel site. It provides five main categories, hotels – guides – attractions – restaurants – nightlife, which pull up an extensive amount of information concerning the selected location. Boo.com is a community based website, since all reviews are written by travellers who have already visited the concerned location. The site is very well structured and “puts everything you need in one place”, offering a fully inclusive search and comparison engine, traveller reviews and direct links to supplier sites.
The site, offering such a complete range of information, makes life for travel hungry visitors quite easy. There is no need any more for going back and forth on sites, checking reviews, finding the official hotel website to get the rate information, trying to find more information or guides on the location itself and by the way the traveler finally choose a hotel, the latter is sold out for the requested dates. It is very timesaving and easy for the visitor to find out everything about the location, check all sorts of different hotels and even find the best rate, since Boo.com compares the rates on nine booking sites, such as booking.com, trav.com or laterooms.com.
Boo.com offers free referencing of hotels and restaurants, which helps to increase their site visibility and at the same time also offers a solution to send highly targeted traffic directly to the property’s website and gives the visitor the possibility to directly book with the hotel. There is also the opportunity for tourism related businesses to reference for free under the category “things to do”.
Given the fact that the site is very visitor friendly and at the same time attracts businesses with free referencing, the importance of the site grows which helps the website to increase revenue through advertising. The more visitors the site counts, the more interesting it is for partners to advertise on Boo.com.

Boo.com basically caters to everybody who is interested in travelling. The travel guides provide information for young people as well as for the more mature generation. Information and travel tips are covering all kinds of budgets, so everybody can be sure to find what he or she is looking for.
As mentioned earlier, there is no subscription fee for site members, neither a reference fee for hotels or tourism related businesses of all sorts. The travel site’s main revenue therefore certainly comes from advertising and eventually from commissions from the sponsored booking sites.
Boo.com is following a trend which started quite a few years ago – community based travel tips and reviews, helping the visitor to prepare his visit and eventually book his hotel. Two very known sites, and of course competitors to Boo.com are Expedia.com and Tripadvisor.com. Those two sites are of course bigger and more developed than Boo.com, since they’ve been up and running for a much long time, but yet Boo.com has the advantage of a more human look and feel and the visitor does not risk to get lost on their site. Moreover on Tripadviser for instance, one is forced to sign up before being able to take a peek at a city guide, Expedia is not even offering destination guides, but mainly a list of commercialized attractions.
The travel site business model is unique to the web, since it uses the knowledge of everybody, the “collective wisdom” to bring the various worldwide destinations closer to the potential travellers. Travel sites, such as Boo.com brought the conventional offline travel agency a huge step further, since the traveller does not only depend on the opinion of the travel agency’s salesperson, but can use the advise and tips of millions of people worldwide.
More and more people like to use travel sites to get information before their trips. It is a little bit like asking a friend, who just travelled to the destination in question, for advice. The site’s members’ opinions are honest and not biased or influential like marketing and PR strategies. More and more individuals are looking for democratization of services and honesty and the sense of community becomes stronger, therefore business models based on these values, such as the one used by Boo.com, will certainly grow during the years to come.
Nevertheless to make their site more known and increase their number of members, Boo.com could launch for instance an application on Facebook. Moreover it would go along with the very modern and young look of boo.com and at the same time facilitates even more the use of the website for the user.
Also Boo.com does not yet offer flight reservations, as do other travel sites, which certainly would be a further plus for the site and would help to increase revenue through for example special airline features.
Another way to expand revenue sources in the future could be to offer mobile phone applications, such as maps or “SOS I’m lost” direct help.
Even though hotel referencing is free on the site, and this is part of the Boo.com concept, the site could offer payable services to tourism related business, such as special features on the entry page or a “The Boo Team proudly presents...” article to present hotels or restaurants who just signed up.
As consumer needs evolve there will be certainly more than just one way for travel sites to evolve and progress, satisfying travel hungry visitors and the business’ revenue needs all at the same time.
Good suggestions for expansion - Help I'm lost - how does Boo earn revenue on bookings?
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