How do I validate an idea in my marketplace for the industry?

Before you spend $ or time marketing your service / website, ensure that your brand itself is quite strong. For example, if your name or domain is awkward, ambiguous, or off-putting, then every dollar and hour you spend promoting your brand will work less efficiently in your favor than if you were spending the same amount of money and time marketing something more robust and attractive.

As former CMO of Expedia I can tell you that being focused will trump any theoretical upside of having different names. To this day there's a struggle to build daylight in meaning between Hotels.com and Expedia's core hotel business - and there have literally been billions spent on trying to do that over the years. Get clear on who you're for, the problem you solve, what insight you are building against and your positioning against that. There's enough work there on its' own - believe me. Good luck.

That's a much more complicated question than it appears to be, as there are multiple sources which will get you some of the inventory, but nothing which will get you all of the inventory. If you look at an OTA, they are pulling from typical sources like SABRE or Amadeus, but also from what is in effect their own inventory, where hotels are either going in via an extranet or there's some kind of direct-connect to the system the hotel is operating on (which could be one of many, including none at all). In fact, some of the OTA's make that proprietary inventory available too, via an API and on a commissionable sales basis. There's just no one-size-fits-all access point - especially when you consider that worldwide the hotel business is actually very un-aggregated with something like 80% of all hotel room capacity operated independently (that is to say, not branded or part of a chain like Starwood, Accor, IHG etc.). It's a big part of why OTA's have invested so heavily in technology to manage and distribute this type of inventory. It's not easily done as the technology used in the hospitality industry is often not great and it's unconsolidated to there's value and negotiating strength to be brought from consolidating it.

I'd be happy to give you some initial pointers for free. Send me a URL of your site and I'll check it out. If there are a significant number of fixes that need to be done we could also set up a call to go over everything more thoroughly, best, Lee

I can say from experience that there is a huge need for this, as it's exactly what my company, Vayable does. We have a community of more than 5,000 local Insiders who can help advise, plan and curate experiences. You can take a look at our Insiders here: https://www.vayable.com/users/search?query=&sort_by=popularity You can search or browse by destination or interest and contact them directly, or use our in-house Concierge service for a higher touch experience. Concierge: https://www.vayable.com/custom/navigator We are a YCombinator startup based in San Francisco, launched in 2011 and backed by many of the Valley's top investors. Feel free to reach out if you want to learn more about the space.