IN-DEPTH: Interview with Kevin Fliess, general manager and VP of product for Room77

Published: 22 Mar 2011

IN-DEPTH: Interview with Kevin Fliess, general manager and VP of product for Room77

By Ritesh Gupta

Recently, Room 77, which is being described as the world’s first hotel room database and search engine, emerged.

Room 77’s promise: potential hotel guests can visualise a room product more intimately, giving incentive to book into higher tier room categories. Room 77 highlights the best attributes of rooms in a fun and engaging way.

Currently, Room 77 has indexed over 425,000 rooms.

Sharing expansion plans with EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta, Kevin Fliess, general manager and VP of product for Room77, said, “Our goal is to include 1 million rooms by the end of the year. Adding hotels requires a tremendous amount work and dedication from our team, and we are looking to the community to help us in crowdsourcing this information across the globe. It’s as easy as taking a picture of the emergency exit plan on the back of a door and sending it to us at tips@room77.com – even these small bits of information on properties helps us to build our database of rooms and hotels.”

Fleiss spoke in detail about the venture, which is currently in its public beta phase. Excerpts:

It is considered that travel personalisation is still in its infancy. Since Room 77 matches room within a given hotel based on traveller’s preferences for view, floor, distance from elevator and connecting rooms, how do you think Room 77 is setting a new benchmark in personalisation in the travel industry?

Kevin Fliess:

While personalisation is important, especially when it comes to hotel rooms that meet a traveller’s needs providing transparency into the hotel room selection process (is important). The uncertainty of a hotel room is one of the biggest imbalances in travel today, and we aim to change that by giving people the information they need to be able to request the room that is best for them.

What factors did you take into consideration while coming up with this offering? Which areas are you trying to address through your hotel room database and search engine?

Kevin Fliess:

We developed Room 77 with the traveller in mind. We first talked to dozens of travellers we know and considered the most important features for people in their hotel room, the specific preferences of the leisure traveller and the business traveller, and then designed our unique search algorithm from there. On the data side, we built and input a lot of the floor plan information in by hand, double checking each detail to make sure the room information was completely accurate.

The goal is to give travellers more control over their hotel stay and ensure the best travel experience possible.

People are in control of almost every element of their travel planning, from where they go down to their airline seat assignment, but they are at the mercy of the front desk when it comes to the room they stay in at the hotel. Travellers have many different needs when it comes to a room, and we created Room 77 to give travellers insight into the best room at any hotel for them.

What do you think differentiates your offering as an intermediary?

Kevin Fliess:

We're the only site on the web that shows you the actual rooms in the hotel. Period. While there are tons of sites that have hotel-level information, nobody has actually taken the time to map out and describe every single room in the hotel -- until now. Armed with unprecedented insight into which rooms are right for them, consumers can have a better planning, shopping, and check-in experience.

When you say potential hotel guests can visualise a room product more intimately, can you explain the depth of this visualisation or to what extent are they real - what all can one see and how have you managed to work on this? Can you provide an insight into features such as imagery, mapping etc. and how this has been used to depict the real imagery of rooms?

Kevin Fliess:

Typically, hotels provide information on the amenities within a hotel room and generic stock photos of what the room could look like, and they focus on the interior of the hotel room vs. the view from the room itself.

Our image search algorithm takes into account altitude, latitude and longitude, and using Google Earth video technology, we are able to calculate a virtual view – either a breathtaking skyline or a parking lot – which provides travellers with additional information to help them find the best room for their needs.

Right now we are in public beta, and we are sourcing information and images from our community and hotels themselves, which includes actual pictures from rooms across the globe. We plan to provide those images as well in the near future.

Can you elaborate on proprietary Room Match algorithm and also the core idea of colour-coded match percentage?

Kevin Fliess:

The Room Results provides a rank order of hotel rooms across all categories, based on default preference filters (floor: high, view: important, distance from elevator: far, and connecting: any). For each room, Room Rank algorithm calculates the percentage match based on the traveller’s preferences. As a traveller adjusts preferences and/or narrows to a specific room category, this list will update in real time. Travellers can then compare and contrast rooms by clicking on different rooms.

A strong match, highlighted in green, is any room with a match percentage of over 70%. These rooms are the closest equivalent to a traveller’s selected preferences. Rooms designated in yellow are fair matches, but may not meet all of the traveller’s needs. Rooms in red are weak matches that do not meet a traveller’s required needs.

Room 77 says its team has done extensive research about the hotels it is featuring, and also chatted up the front desk staff to get the inside scoop on the best rooms. Can you explain what is this research all about and what information are you referring to when you say scoop? How is the same being presented on the site?

Kevin Fliess:

Building a global database of hotel rooms in different cities and across different hotel chains and independent properties is hard manual work. We’ve been at this for more than a year and have acquired two key businesses – TripKick and OpTrip – that helped to fast-track our position.

We have people on the ground gathering property and room details, sometimes directly from the hotel and sometimes from a sketch of the floor plan from the back of the hotel room door, and we’ve used that information as the basis of our database. In the coming year, we anticipate that our database will grow through partnerships with hotels as much as user-generated, “sleuthed” content.

How have you focused on making your site or the usage of its features user-friendly?

Kevin Fliess:

We’ve built Room 77 with the user in mind, and we’ve been testing features and taking user feedback since day 1. We recently included wi-fi signal information within our search results based on feedback we received at launch, and we plan to continue to refine the site based on response from our users.