Skift Take
Hotel Urbano is focused on being a Big Data-infused travel company with an online travel agency platform in Brazil, one of the largest emerging markets in the world. Hotel Urbano claims it is not only riding that demand, but is also creating it.
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 that its customers tend to book travel every 100 days or so, a frequency that is much greater than the norm in the travel industry.
The Hotel Urbano founder says the site is educating the Brazilian public about online booking and getting customers accustomed to using its mobile app while discouraging call center bookings, and all of this is taking place as the Brazilian economy and its hotel market is undergoing fairly spectacular growth.
Skift discussed these issues, and others related to the future of travel booking with Mendes.
An edited version of the interview follows:
Skift: What are some of the trends you are seeing when people book hotels on the Hotel Urbano website, app or through a call center, and how is it all changing?
João Ricardo Mendes I think a huge trend is not just the way people book hotels, which is very similar to any other online travel agency. Ever since we started Hotel Urbano four years ago, we have been able to monitor and track the behavior of every single potential traveler. So at Hotel Urbano we have quite a different approach than the traditional OTAs. If you already know you want to go to New York you can go on Booking.com and book a hotel. The same with Expedia and Hotels.com. At Hotel Urbano, 35% of our business comes from these kind of clients who already knows the place they
