Walksource (YC S14) helps hotels solve relocations
techcrunch.comOh no Walnut Creek, the humanity of it all! It's a whole half hour on the yellow line to downtown SF.
All jokes aside, this is probably pretty smart, although maybe give more involvement to the customer. The first thing anyone does when the hotel tells them its overbooked is take to their smartphone. If a customer can say, "can I stay here instead?" it might help nudge the process along.
Hate to be negative nellie but this strikes me as a very small niche that should almost disappear on its own. Which is fine, just not something I'd expect from YC or venture in general.
While getting "walked" is the short story, you could flatten this out to other overbooked rentals like automobiles. If you can set up a system that is efficient enough to allow a company to overbook without worrying about hurting customer satisfaction I imagine there is a lot of money to be made.
So how does Walksource guarantee placement? How is this better than say using HotelTonight to place someone?