The Hotel Guru, a Scots ecommerce business offering original and aggregated reviews of the world's top boutique hostelries, has reached its 250,000 unique users a month. Hugh Graham-Watson, who founded the business from a farmhouse in Stirlingshire, said that in 2014 site users generated £2 million in room sales for partner companies, including the industry leader Booking.com.
The website hotelguru.com, now administered from rural Angus and London, is maintained by a handful of specialist hotel researchers, collating up-to-date, high-quality information on 4000 of the most interesting and unique hotels submitted by a team of 50 locally-knowledgeable reviewers in markets throughout the world. Graham-Watson said that the company's priority in 2015 was increasing its coverage to take in cities and resorts outside the UK and Europe, with tie-ups being negotiated with sector specialists in Australasia, South America and the Caribbean and Japan. The company is also looking to increase its presence on social media.
"Traffic has grown hugely over the last 18 months and we've doubled turnover ever year since we started in 2010." Graham-Watson said "The hotel booking market is dominated by a few giants, but we are now one of the biggest websites in our specialised niche, aimed at people who want to get the most complete picture possible before they make their decisions. Rather than the big chains, we deal mostly with independent luxury boutique hotels of below 30 bedrooms but that is not a hard and fast rule as destinations like, say, Hong Kong don't offer many of those.
"We tend to be interested in hotels that offer a high level of service, but this doesn't necessarily mean the most expensive places. The average room rate on our site is about £150, not premium, not bargain, but something a bit superior."
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