Once a poster child for dot-com flameouts, former online fashion retailing site boo.com is back in business — this
time as an online travel research site with a social-networking twist.
The site, which went live this week, is capitalizing on the social-networking craze to offer a collection of online communities that comment on
their experiences to help fellow travelers make more informed choices before
booking. It’s like Yelp, the restaurant-and-more review site. Only for
Boo.com, it is all about travel.
Ray Nolan, CEO of boo.com, said one of the goals of the site is to end
the “circle of gloom” in which customers slog through different sites and
platforms to find the right hotel or flight before booking.
“We call it social networking with a purpose,” he told
internetnews.com. “It’s about you and I sharing our favorite places,
either among ourselves or with a broader audience.” After all, he noted,
you’re more likely to take your friends’ recommendations about where to go
in New York for a steak.
The site is keen on the trust factor. Nolan said users can identify
members that they trust and see what they think of hotels, bars, restaurants
and sightseeing. They can also create their own “boo crew” in order to
highlight group reviews alongside the wider network.
But why choose the same dot-com that became legendary for how much cash
it burned (an estimated
$150 million), before it went belly up in early 2000?
Nolan said in a way, the site is exorcising the ghost of boo’s past, but
at the same time respecting the vision of the original venture to “create a
site that caters to the user, loaded with interactivity, results and
emotion.”
Total investment for this version of boo.com? Nolan said about $300,000,
and that the parent company of boo.com, online reservation provider Web
Reservations International (WRI), did over $19 million (euro) in profit last
year.
Plus, he added, “We really just liked the domain name. It works well in
many languages.”
