Skift Take
Getaroom is a niche player, but it is steadily growing and its unpublished rates over the phone are very appealing. Traditional online players may want to rethink their call center outsourcing and current practices.
Bob Diener is the sales, marketing and finance guy, who calmly and openly talks up the unique elements of his latest little project.
David Litman is the tenacious tech guy, focusing on the website, the call center operation, and customer service.
In the 1990s and through 2003, they guided their baby, Hotel Reservations Network, which became Hotels.com, as it engaged in a seeming grand theft of hotel market share.
Today, in a second act of sorts, Litman is the CEO of Getaroom.com, and Diener is president.
And, that's precisely how just they defined their roles throughout their Hotels.com journey.
Working together has been easy, to a degree
Actually, the duo goes back even further than that, as the two have known each other, and worked together basically since their Cornell Law School days, which ended in 1982.
In 2009, years after making big money selling Hotels.com to USA Networks and seeing it later become an Expedia Inc. subsidiary, Litman and Diener founded Getaroom.com, an online and offline travel agency with plenty of twists.
"We've been partners for 30 years on a handshake deal," Litman says.
"We complement each other," Diener adds. "We've never had an argument in almost 30 years."
