Venere.com

» see venere.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Venere started selling Roman and Florentine hotel rooms over the web in february 1995 and took its first reservation in june. Consider what that required at both ends. On one side, a traveler with a browser, in a year when having a browser at all put you in a rounding error of the population. On the other side, a family-run pensione in Trastevere that in all likelihood had no computer in the building, and a booking that therefore arrived by fax.

The company was Venere Net Srl, founded in Rome in 1994 by Matteo Fago, Marco Bellacci, Renata Sarno and Gianandrea Strekelj. The name is the Italian for Venus and the logo was Botticelli's, which is either the most obvious possible choice for an Italian hotel site or exactly the right one. It incorporated properly in 2001 and by the middle of the next decade it was the largest independent hotel booking operation in Europe.

In 1995 I was eleven years old and three years away from a modem. Booking a hotel from a browser was not something that existed anywhere near me, and would not for a long time. The Turkish version of this arrived more than a decade later, and when it did it arrived the same way it had arrived in Italy, one small hotel at a time, because the technology was never the hard part.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hard part ~

By the time Expedia came looking in 2008, Venere had direct contracts with roughly twenty nine thousand hotels and bed and breakfasts, twenty six thousand of those in Europe, and was adding more than a thousand properties a month. That number is the whole company. It is not a website statistic. Every one of those lines represents somebody at a desk in Rome persuading an individual proprietor in Umbria or Andalusia to hand over their room inventory to a screen.

This is what nobody outside the industry understood about online travel for twenty years. The site is trivial. Anyone can build a search form over a room database. The asset is the twenty nine thousand signatures, and it can only be assembled slowly by people making phone calls, which is why the winners in that market are always the ones who started earliest and stayed boring for longest.

~ the acquisition ~

Expedia announced the deal in july 2008 and closed it on 3 september, buying the company from Advent International and the founders for a figure never officially disclosed and reported since at around two hundred million euro. It brought Expedia more than ten thousand hotel properties it did not already have across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and it was explicitly the answer to a question Expedia had been unable to answer any other way, which was what to do about Booking.com.

Booking.com had built the same asset on a different commercial model and had built more of it. Venere was large and European and could not close the gap, and Expedia never worked out whether to run it as a separate brand with its own audience or as a supply pipe into the brands it already owned. It ended up doing a little of both for eight years, which is how a business gets to 2016 still recognizable and no longer growing.

~ the redirect ~

Venere.com stopped taking new bookings on 1 december 2016 and traffic went to Hotels.com, another Expedia brand. The company said the site had faced a number of headwinds, which is the phrase you use when the honest sentence is that a competitor was simply bigger. The Italian business-to-business travel agency operation kept running, so the corporate entity did not die, only the consumer address did.

venere.com does not resolve at all now, which is a different ending from the one the redirect implies. The brand that Expedia spent two hundred million euro on to have a European identity was folded into a brand it already owned, and then the address it was folded out of was allowed to lapse entirely. Twenty two years and twenty nine thousand hotel contracts, ending at somebody else's homepage and then at nothing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »