One-Stop-Shop Hotel Booking Solutions Provider for Corporate Business Worldwide: ehotel^®

"We are always there for you, from the moment of booking and beyond!"

The development of the travel and tourism industry has played a major role in the expansion of the hospitality industry and hotels market. Clearly, hospitality and tourism services are interdependent which, in turn, are expected to drive the hotels market growth over the forecast timeframe. As the sector is expanding at a faster pace, the task of manual data organization and maintenance becomes even more time consuming and cumbersome. This is where an automated hotel booking system comes to your rescue. Moving to a hotel booking system provides hoteliers with a host of benefits that can improve efficiency and enables them to generate more revenue.

ehotel^® is a hotel booking platform that has portal links to hundreds of hotel reservation systems, hotel providers, purchasing groups, and hotel bed databases. The offers of all systems add up to approximately seven million hotels – a portfolio that grows with each newly connected provider. The firm has a unique technology that merges with hotels, existing quotas, the offers available from a different system, and provides the maximum amount of bookable hotels at the best rates. The ehotel^® portal not only saves time but also offers a cost-intensive search.

The company was incorporated in 2000 and is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

Fritz Zerweck: Interview Highlights

Can you brief us about the history of your company?

The company was set up to meet the needs of business travelers to provide a comprehensive hotel booking platform. We put our clients at the center of our work and constantly optimize our services and adapt to the current trend. We offer a hotel booking in its entirety. Whether the occasion is business or a mini getaway, luxury or low budget, the appropriate room for any taste can be found quickly and easily via ehotel^®. We are always there for you, from the moment of booking and beyond! Whether for an individual stay, or a group or conference booking request, our competent hotel experts advise each customer on an individual basis. Put your trust in the highest data security standards and more than 20 years of experience in the market. With ehotel^® there are no service fees or hidden charges.

A well-defined mission and vision is the secret behind the success of many firms. What is your company's M&V statement?

We seek to simplify business trips for employees and companies from booking to billing – regardless of the price level and for individual travelers as well as for large conference groups.

What is your greatest fear and how do you manage fear?

What do we have to be afraid of in terms of our company development? It is not our goal to grow whatever the cost. Our focus is always on customer satisfaction, which we achieve through very good service and the ongoing development of our unique Meta Search technology and range of products. Therefore, we don't need to worry.

What were the biggest initial hurdles to building your business and how did you overcome them?

It was definitely a challenge in the early stages to put our vision of innovative WAP technology into practice. But a bigger hurdle was becoming sufficiently well-known to acquire a customer base that would give us a fair crack of the whip as a hotel booking portal. We achieved this above all by offering tailor-made solutions for small and medium-sized companies and by being the first booking platform to be able to compare offers. Our approach of simplifying the search for cheap hotel rooms and the associated booking procedure for business travelers and companies was and still is original. In contrast to large portals that attract customers with discount offers and best price promises, ehotel^® still offers reliable Meta Search technology. From the outset, we employ neither advertising tricks nor unclear business methods and that has always paid off.

If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting, what would it be?

Do not lose sight of your goal regardless of how many opportunities there are.

What do you hope to accomplish in the long run?

We want to go on supporting business travelers by offering them individual, optimized solutions in the future. Although ehotel^® has grown to become one of the most successful hotel-booking platforms, that doesn't mean that we should stop working on what we can offer. Even in the long term, it is important for us to never lose sight of our customers and continue to grow organically with the modern demands for sustainable travel at affordable prices.

Moreover, we want to close the last gaps in the system for companies booking travel to offer a complete digital cycle because, despite enormous customer satisfaction, we never take our success for granted. There is always room for improvement.

“Our focus is always on customer satisfaction, which we achieve through very good service and the ongoing development of our unique Meta Search technology and range of products.”