Interview: Hotel Urbano CEO on Using Big Data to Battle Booking Rivals

Editor’s Note: Skift is publishing a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and the evolving habits and device preferences of travel consumers. Check out all the interviews as they come out here. João Ricardo Mendes, founder and co-CEO of Rio de Janeiro-based Hotel Urbano, the leading hotel online travel agency in Brazil, is nothing if not confident. Mendes says Hotel Urbano, which raised $50 million in venture capital funding in a Series D round in March, plans to go to the well again in the first quarter of 2015 and raise perhaps triple that amount before going the IPO route a year or two later. Mendes says he has the utmost respect for the people at Booking.com, but warns Booking.com and Expedia that although "they may be a shark in the ocean," Hotel Urbano is "a crocodile in the Amazon River." Rhetoric aside, Mendes details how Hotel Urbano is using Big Data to uncover travel intent and is generating so much demand t