Make Direct Reservations & Avoid Paying Commission with InnovaReviews

The ability to make more direct reservations and avoid paying commission to the online travel agents, now that would be nice. 

InnovaReviews actually helps travel service providers, like hostel & independent hotel owners and tour & activity providers, do just that. They enable them to collect, moderate and publish previous customer reviews on their own websites.

We linked up with Paul Lupson, Co-founder and Product Owner at InnovaReviews and Travel Massive Brisbane Member, to get a bit more information about their story and how InnovaReviews benefits the tourism industry.

What inspired you to create InnovaReviews?

Big OTAs like Hostelworld and Expedia, rely on guest reviews to convert their ‘lookers into bookers’ – but the systems we had in Expedia required an army of engineers to develop and maintain. The average hostel or independent hotel owner doesn’t have such resources.

We know travel service providers want to take direct reservations and avoid paying large commissions to the OTAs, but if their websites don’t have the same useful features as the big OTAs, crucial information like reviews, then Google will still favor the OTAs in the search ranking, and customers will continue to use them.

We saw other review services available but they cost several hundred dollars per month, which is way too expensive for a small business.

We saw an opportunity for a powerful review platform, that published reviews directly onto the hotel, hostel or tour & activity providers’ own website, easy to install, and super low-cost.

What makes InnovaReview unique? 

We really understand the online travel space and how critical reviews are for occupancy. Also, after owning a couple of tourist apartments in Barcelona, we have firsthand experience of being small hoteliers ourselves.

There are likely no other startups that offer a powerful review platform, developed from years of firsthand knowledge, that plug-in as easily to a website and cost only $6 USD per month. ?

How were you able to gain traction for InnovaReviews?

I am a professional product manager, so my job is to observe processes, identify problems and design solutions. I scoped out how I envisaged a review service to work, then hired a freelance developer to build a basic first version.

With the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) I was able to bring a few clients on board. These early adopters gave it a go and liked it, so I was able to really tune the product to match their needs.

The MVP also enabled me to attract a world-class engineer and the best designer I’ve worked with, who clicked around the product and could see the potential of InnovaReviews.

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

Work in the industry that interests you. Spend a couple of years finding problems and pain points which every company has.

Make sure the problem you’re solving is a big one, that negatively affects many businesses or individuals, think scale.

Be determined, but open-minded – you might think a problem worth solving can be a business, and maybe it is, but you will have critics.  Be determined to stand by your idea if you know more than the critic. Dig deep into data that backs your theory. If the data isn’t there then be prepared to pivot your thinking and devise another solution for the problem or find another problem entirely.

What’s next for InnovaReviews?

We have a target number of clients we want using our review service. Developing the product further, going deeper into the analysis of the review data our clients are collecting and presenting it back to them in an easy-to-understand, actionable way.

Thank you to InnovaReviews for supporting this week’s Travel Massive feature. Stay in touch with InnovaReviews by following them on Travel Massive and Facebook.