Whe sells the cheapest vacation? For years internet companies like Booking, Expedia, Groupon, Kayak, Secret Escapes, Holiday Pirates and many more have boasted about offering the best travel deals on the net. Regardless of whether it is a question of flights, hotels or package deals, due to skyrocketing energy costs and rapidly increasing inflation, the price is also playing an increasingly important role when booking a holiday.
The Austrian start-up Midnightdeal has also been bustling about on the German market since last year. The idea behind it: The user decides whether he wants to pay the hotelier a suggested immediate price for the overnight stay or whether he prefers to make a bid. He determines the amount of the bid using a slider. An emoji tells him if the price is reasonable. Anyone who makes a fair offer will see a smiley face. If you bid too little, a sad smiley will appear. At midnight, the customer receives the award by e-mail – or not.
The top dogs among the booking platforms offer millions of hotels today. Booking alone has more than 28 million accommodation listings on its website in just about every part of the world. Midnightdeal, on the other hand, currently only lists around 200 hotels in around a dozen countries. Why? “We follow the boutique hotel approach,” says Midnightdeal founder Lukas Zirker. His company focuses on “affordable luxury” and primarily offers inexpensive four- and five-star hotels.
no money back
So far, the offer has focused primarily on the Alpine countries as well as Italy and Croatia, i.e. regions that are easy to reach by car. Recently, Zirker’s company also offers hotels in France, Spain, Portugal and Greece. And business is going well. The entrepreneur has now sent 25,000 people on trips. Today he handles about 1000 bookings every month. With his concept, the Austrian sees his finger on the pulse of the times. “The trend towards vacationing with your own travel arrangements will continue in the years to come,” he is convinced.
If you choose one of the offers that can be booked immediately, you save up to 20 percent compared to the big portals. If you bid cleverly, even up to 35 percent. But how do the low prices come about? If you are looking for bargains, you have to register in the community. The idea of the closed user group is by no means new, but it can be advantageous for the customer in terms of price. Because hotels can often offer much more favorable conditions within a community in the short term than the publicly visible prices agreed with the large portals.
“Those who stick to the emojis get a surcharge of 90 percent,” says Zirker. Not only the customer and hotelier benefit from such a “deal”, but also the entrepreneur himself, because Zirker receives a commission for every room brokered. However, there is a catch: If a customer has to cancel a trip, he does not get any money back. “Cancellations are not automatically included with us,” says the entrepreneur. “But if you value it or book well in advance, you have the option of taking out additional insurance.”
Actually an art project
Zirker’s focus is primarily on the target group between 20 and 40. His community currently has around 100,000 members. Up to 7000 new ones are added every month. And bidding is actually fun: you find yourself somewhere between Ebay and poker. However, everyone who makes an offer must be aware that nothing is free at Midnightdeal. Only every third bid is accepted by the hotelier. And to check whether the prices are really cheaper than elsewhere, you can at best do a random check of hotels that can also be booked on other portals. In the end, the customer has to decide for himself whether the price is good.
With the “pay as you wish” pricing model, the customer selects the amount they pay for a product or service. There is usually no minimum price. The model lives from the idea of solidarity. In this way, those people who can afford to pay more have the opportunity to make up for what others cannot. This offers financially restricted people the opportunity to participate in social life in restaurants, cafés and cultural venues. Different examples from all over the world show that it also works economically. This is also the case at Café Gagarin, a collectively run restaurant in Vienna that has fixed prices for drinks but gives customers free rein when it comes to paying for food.
The interior, which is somewhat reminiscent of a party cellar, is also available for cultural and political events, which also refers to the basic socio-political idea of such “pay as you wish” formats. Basically an anti-capitalist virtue that shows that things can work differently if you trust your fellow human beings and believe in fairness. Andreas Strauss, the initiator of Dasparkhotel, explains that this works. This is a non-commercial lodging project called a “hospitality device” and is actually an art project as well. The hotels consist of furnished sewage pipes that were placed in parks. Dasparkhotel is now represented at three locations in Germany and Austria.