What are the must-read (or must be on) sites for small/mid-size hotel group executives?

Happy to help with this and can probably bring lots of ideas to the table. Also, since LOCAL is the focus, you can't just use digital. Most of your bookings are going to come from local non digital marketing, but they will coincide with the digital marketing you do. The efforts need to be combined for effectiveness. If you are interested in a call please send me link to hotel's site so I can research before hand. OTA might not be the way to go. Happy to hop on a 10 minute free call to discuss further to see if there is a fit.

It's hard to tell from your question what you have / don't have. Do you have an MVP? Do you have people using the 'discovery tool' yet? It will be hard to get any restaurant to pay you anything unless you have a deployed MVP already. You'll need to show them actual data of the value of your tool. To do that you need people to be using it to find restaurants. So put restaurants into your tool without the restaurants necessarily paying anything for the listing. Once you have traffic you can start charging the restaurants for certain features. That doesn't mean you should wait until your MVP is done before talking to restaurants though. To develop your MVP you should be visiting restaurants and talking to them about whether the features you're currently working on would be something they're actually interested in, and ask them open ended questions that may bring up ideas that you hadn't even thought of. If you'd like more specific advice on the types of questions to ask, or what the restaurants might want to see in terms of MVP data, or general MVP development help, let me know, best, Lee

I think a better question would be to understand why people are cancelling after making a booking? Are you catering to business travelers whose schedules may change? (no amount of cuddling will save all sales) Are you catering to vacationers who might find better deals elsewhere? (appeal to their frugality with special non-flexible offers) Take a page from the airline industry, perhaps simply offer different rates with different options. Cheaper rate is pre-paid and non-cancellable, higher rate has full flexibility. Then you can more narrowly focus your efforts on cementing the 'flexible bookers' while you've already collected on the more frugal folks. Cheers Feel free to book a call if you'd like to chat. David Barnett

Validation and monetization - two great questions. See some great tips on how to do validation in this answer: https://clarity.fm/questions/6423/how-do-you-do-market-research (happy to help you plan your specific validation process) Regarding monetization - the most suitable business models in this case would be commission / intermediate fee taken from either the advertisers or the owners of the advertising spaces (spas, coworking spaces) or both of them. Good luck I've successfully helped over 350 entrepreneurs, startups and businesses, and I would be happy to help you. After scheduling a call, please send me some background information so that I can prepare in advance - thus giving you maximum value for your money. Take a look at the great reviews I’ve received: https://clarity.fm/assafben-david

My family is in the hotel business. I can tell that we would have absolutely no interest in doing this. We make sure out employees look after our property and provide great customer service. We do not have down time for them. We run a tight ship. The liability and other headaches that come with what you propose is incredible. The only thing we would consider doing is using one of our banquet facility rooms as a senior day-care center from 9am to 2pm Mon-Friday because a company would be paying us for the space and food. Everything else is on them.