LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM–(Marketwire – Sept. 17, 2010) – Peter Jones’ hotel experience started in the toilet. While managing a small apartment hostel in Budapest and doing it all, from managing bookings to cleaning toilets, he would often find himself helping guests find other accommodations when he was fully booked and had to turn them away.
“Great customer service starts before someone even is a customer.” says Mr. Jones, Founder and Managing Director of Onlyrooms.com.
Today, from booking hotels in Budapest to Ho Chi Minh City, Peter Jones, with Onlyrooms.com, has you covered.
Competing with the online booking giants such as booking.com, expedia.com and orbitz,com is not for the faint-of-heart. But travelers looking for a road less traveled (and in some cases, unpaved), Onlyrooms.com offers a surprising selection for the adventurous, budget-conscious traveler. Whether it’s families, students or simply the traveler who understands that low cost doesn’t have to mean low class, onlyrooms.com offers properties from multiple bedroom apartments to traditional hotels to hostels. Onlyrooms.com is also one of the first YouTube, video-based online hotel booking search engines around.
As a hotelier himself, Peter Jones understands the hospitality business. Not surprisingly, customer service is a key component to his business. He has personally visited many of the properties from Asia to Australia or the Croatian coast.
Specializing in cities throughout eastern Europe, Asia and Australia, the company’s portfolio includes hard-to-find properties in off the beaten trail destinations. Ho Chi Minh City. Bodensdorf, Austria. Opatija, Croatia, Cochin, India. Ravenna, Italy. The website also has a top 10 places to go section, offering rich content for each city. The most looked at page being places to see in Budapest, and Prague. The company’s list of cities is niche and esoteric with a couple of conspicuous exceptions. Paris and Los Angeles.
With an engaging interface, his is one of the first online hotel booking sites to exclusively make use of YouTube, showing visitors current views of available properties.
While the site’s hotel selection is not as robust as the online giants, Onlyrooms.com has one advantage the giants can’t offer: in almost every case, the management is personally familiar with the properties they list and often know the management on a first-name basis. And with a growing library of YouTube spots featuring each of the hotels, visitors can get a better, true-to-life look at their hotel choices. Many of the YouTube spots feature Mr Jones giving viewers a walk-through tour of the featured hotel. Recently, Onlyrooms.com has upgraded their on camera presenters, hiring an array of stunning Budapest fashion models to provide the walk-through. Interestingly, since changing presenters, the number of YouTube views has grown considerably.
His formula must be working. He has been enjoying 300 % per month revenue increases for the past three months. In a down travel market, for onlyrooms.com, things are looking up.