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I work for Booking.com. Amazon entered the hotel reservation business in early 2015 with Amazon Destinations, and then inexplicably shut it down a few months la
by avar 9y ago
I work for Booking.com. Amazon entered the hotel reservation business in early 2015 with Amazon Destinations, and then inexplicably shut it down a few months later[1].
At the time there was the expectation that they'd drop commissions to the floor and compete on ultra-thin margins, and there's certainly a lot of room for that in the travel industry.
But they didn't, and then just left within a few months. Weird.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/14/amazon-shuts-down-its-hotel-booking-site-amazon-destinations/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/14/amazon-shuts-down-its-hote...
- akinjide 9y agoPretty sure they did a lot of market research before calling shutting down, most companies make decisions that's align with their goal/aim.
- rapfaria 9y agoBut what about the research before creating Amazon Destinations?
- onychomys 9y agoPlenty of famous ones also don't, as evidenced by google's umpteen different messaging apps.
- EpicEng 9y agoSo you're thought is that the market research they had three months prior to shutting down was significantly different than what they had three months later? I'm pretty sure you're not pretty sure of anything here.
- Sholmesy 9y agoSimilar situation with Amazon Tickets, they threw money at it, then abruptly stopped. I imagine they do this a lot in a lot of industries to see what sticks.
- StudentStuff 9y agoDon't forget about Amazon Local Register, a common theme among all these failed and summarily canned offerings is Amazon was going up against an industry where the core business was relationship based between vendors and venues/businesses, with small margins after everything is said and done. Amazon seems not to want to eat its lunch forever outside its artificial book subsidies. If a product isn't net positive within 2 years, its off to the chopping block.