Noble Travels Group, today announced the launch of Bid2Travel.com, which their release claims is India’s first online bidding site bringing unsold, last-minute inventory of rooms straight to the customer. While the original auction pioneer is having some mid life troubles with its kids, Bid2Travel essentially brings the auction model to the Indian travel segment on the web. Basically the site allows you to bid for hotel rooms which are actually unsold rooms in hotels to get it at the lowest cost.
While the idea is auction driven it is not a complete rpelica of the Ebay model, the similarity ends with the customer quoting the price he is willing to pay and there is no counter bids that go around here. The basic premise Noble group is sticking with is to usher in the power of the web for hoteliers to make good unsold inventories. Much like we Indians get veggies for quite low towards the end of the day (this is not question Bid2Travel’s brand image in anyway) with vendor discounting the price to meet the sale. I could have simply said a distress sale really. 
Pritpal S. Saini, Founder and Director of Bid2Travel.com, summarised it thus, “I have a firm belief that a room vacant for a night is revenue lost forever. A property/hotel only has a limited supply, so this revenue cannot be recaptured in the future, it’s like an eBay for the tourism industry, except it is not a competitive bidding process.”
I personally feel the initiative is good, but more than online it is an offline centric business really, with the core of the business forming in effective tie ups with good hotels. The good thing for Noble group in that case is that the biggest successes in Indian digital media has followed a similar approach if you take matrimony, classifieds and jobsites into the picture and not to forget existing OTAs. But on the other hand the existence of other OTAs is a potential problem for Bid2Travel.
This even though they are targetting a niche crowd of late decisions with regards to travel. The problem would be that people would use the service frequently only when they are aware of the brand, and this would mean proactive marketing. However, the keywords and competition in terms of advertising is huge considering other OTA s would also be bidding on similar lines (just taking Adwords as an example here). This would mean a higher cost of marketing than what would have been ideal. The success of this venture would proabbaly depend on how they can effectively manage their advertising and promotion without making it a purely cost centre.
Dear Bidders,
Please make sure to check the price of same hotel (similar room) on other porals, before bidding. Chances are quite high that you may bid for higher price than hotel actually charges.
Maneesh, its definitely not distress sale, its additional stream of sell.
I feel, if hotel sells room at 10K per night. they might post it on Bid2Travelfor 15K and lowest bid price could be 9K, you end up paying around 10K for same room. (I might be wrong too).
Thanks Rohit..
I mentioned it as a distress sale for this reason:
It is aimed at late bookers/travellers..i.e people who haven’t planned in advance and need to get a hotel room immediately. Now some hotels who are not running full house in terms of occupancy might end up making a far cheaper sale just for the sake of making a sale, a something is better than nothing scenario.. for e.g. let’s say I am the traveller and I bid for 4000 on a room, the hotelier accepts it because 4000 is better than nothing at all when the room ideally should have gone at 8000. So the distress part is not literal but still comes close to one. He sells at 4000 because the only other option is an empty room and a bit of hope