Joan Vilà, founder of Hotelbeds and Managing Director of TUI Travel Accommodation & Destinations, presents a case study analysing the success factors that have driven the company to become a leading global business
Ithaca, NY, 14th October 2014 – Hotelbeds, a brand from TUI Travel Accommodation & Destinations (A&D), part of TUI Travel PLC, one of the world’s leading leisure travel companies, has taken part in the Cornell Hospitality Research Summit, a “thought leadership” event focused on the future of service innovation. The summit gathers together industry and academic representatives from around the world to Cornell’s Ivy League campus. Today, Joan Vilà, founder of Hotelbeds and Managing Director of TUI Travel A&D, unveiled the company’s intrapreneurial success story at a conference entitled ‘Unleashing the Entrepreneurial Potential within a Leading Established Tourism Group”, together with Juan Roure, Professor of Entrepreneurship and member of IESE’s prestigious International Advisory Board.
During his presentation, Vilà explained how Hotelbeds has earned its place as a leading global provider of hotel accommodation thanks to the implementation of an internal entrepreneurial process. This has contributed to a radical transformation of the company, a key business within TUI A&D’s portfolio.
Established at the turn of the 21st century, Hotelbeds today is the No.1 Global B2B Bedbank and the largest business within TUI Travel A&D, supplying over 60,000 hotels in 180 countries to travel industry clients including airlines, tour operators and travel agents. To facilitate this transformation the company built and developed a unique centralised IT infrastructure, efficiently operating at a global level while helping to facilitate a simple and effective travel supply chain process.
During the presentation, Vilà remarked that “the tourism landscape began to change completely back in 2000, and it was then that we saw a great opportunity in the online accommodation sector”.
That same year, the intrapreneurial team lead by Vilà implemented this B2B industry business model to take advantage of the huge opportunities presented by the possibilities of online distribution. Leveraging the full benefits of this new model, the initiative focused on rapidly developing business from an ever-growing portfolio of new source markets across an increasing number of destinations worldwide. This initiative necessitated profound changes in the structure and culture of the company, transforming it in in a very short timescale from its traditional Destination Management Company (DMC) roots into a travel technology leader in the bedbank space.
The Hotelbeds.com brand was established and officially launched in Palma de Mallorca in 2002. It all started with selling products from one destination (Spain) to just one source market (UK). This has rapidly grown over the past ten years to the point where Hotelbeds now has a local presence in more than 47 countries across Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. For the financial year ending September 2013, Hotelbeds sold more than 18 million roomnights, significantly outperforming market averages and generating 20% growth in Total Transaction Values (TTV) to €1.8 billion. According to Joan Vilà, these successful results have been achieved due to a focused strategy of gradual expansion in international source markets and destinations, which was the main driver for the sustained growth of the company.
