Startup Stories: Travel Industry Veteran Cheryl Rosner on Knowing What You Stand For

In our Skift Startup Stories series, we document travel startup issues, solutions, and lessons from a variety of angles, hoping to shed light on what separates the winners from the losers.  You can read all of the stories in the series here. Cheryl Rosner, co-founder and CEO of boutique and independent hotel search startup Stayful, has a Hotels.com story that you know she's told and retold as an object lesson countless times to anyone who'll listen. President of Hotels.com from 2003 to 2005 and later of sister company Expedia Corporate Travel, Rosner recalls how a nightmare of nightmares occurred at the hotel booking site one evening and, without revealing what the screw-up was, she now says, "I basically brought the company down in one fell swoop." But Rosner laughs about the crisis now because in dealing with the problem,  as employees started drifting in late at night of their own volition, without being summoned, the team discovered an esprit de corps that she be