[archivator]

It was meant to be hotels in a single country, it's still operational at http://bookinbulgaria.com

In this business, the big competitors all reserve a bunch of rooms in the hotels and manage their booking themselves. The hotel is then not allowed to touch these rooms.

The model here was to give the hotels a reception-desk piece of software and have them use it to maintain availability. A lot of the hotels that signed up had nothing like this, so it was definitely a win for them. Armed with exact availability, you can have a much better booking system (and of course, if the hotel only wanted to give you a chunk of their rooms, they're perfectly capable of doing that).

Hotels can sign up on their own (including local bank details, etc) and just need to be reviewed before showing up on the site. It supports i18n, scheduled payments, lots of bells and whistles.

The fact of the matter is that this failed because of market reasons (too small a market, dominated by big players, primarily) but it may have a niche somewhere else on this planet. :)