Clarifications Regarding Editors Statements Here
hutcheson and oneeye, my name is Jose Fonseca and I am the CTO for Hotel Net Service. first of all thank you for taking your time to review this long case.
The other thing they had was an original idea (or at least, one of the first implementations of a new idea.) And that counts for something. The first one is unique, the second is an alternative to monopoly, the third is, um, of less interest but tolerated. The tenth is just spam -- unless it offers something palpably unique.
i hope car dealers do not read this thread. if the government reasoned like you there'd be 9 businesses in each area.
there are many unique features on hotel net service that no other agency has, regardless of how much they invested. i'll list just a few.
my main intention is exercizing our right to reply to the several unfundamented accusations you made. clearly our site was not impartially reviewed.
our main differential, which our customers always appreciate is that once the customer makes the request they are in DIRECT contact with property managers. this is guaranteed through our contract with the hotels, they will service your request and reply to you personally. no other online agency allows this.
large agencies like expedia do not list little family-run hotels in italy, spain, germany, france and elsewhere. we not only list those but we personally attend to both hotel and customer requests as to allow worldwide travellers to stay in the most remote and often unknown sites securely and comfortably. no other agency offers this kind of personal attention and direct contact with managers. they usually have some canned system where you enter numbers, click OK and wait.
What, so you can sell my details and add a million more junk emails to my emal account.
we take this as a rather serious accusation. you obviously did not read our privacy policy. we've had one in place since day 1 in operation, that was in 1999 when we started doing this through free sites even before we were able to establish hotel net service.
we have secure certificates from Thawte Consulting. i think your everyday spammer does not identify himself to the world through a Certification Authority does he/she?
But what did I get? I need to give you my first name, last name, email address, and create a password.
we do NOT sell, share, distribute or use personal information for any other reason. it is on our privacy policy.
When there are goodness knows how many perfectly good hotel booking systems that don't ask for those pieces of information, and that give up their content without fuss, why on earth would I even dream of using your one?
if you ever made an online hotel reservation without providing your name, email and password you are likely in violation of international law which requires identification AND authentication of all travellers. we are not making a case for you to use our system.
what you seem to suggest here would be nirvana for terrorists. YES we require proper identification.
hotel net service is a legal entity, an established and registered travel agency based in Rome, Italy. registered as a societta di responsabilitta limitata(LLC in USA). we are NOT a spammy one geek operation, we are a multinational company with several employees, a fully equipped datacenter and real estate in Rome and Brazil. we have also proudly served 35.000 satisfied customers and growing.
we are bound by contract with every participant in our business(hotels and customers).
Keep wasting your time then, your choice. Your site gives every impression of being affiliate spam
i understand we may be wasting our time. it's clearly a waste of time when getting listed is not worth it anymore judging by the above accusations and personal opinions of a legitimate and successful business.
Whilst that remains the case you can add every hotel in the entire world and it would make zero difference.
it has become so obvious to us now that you are not judging by agency quality and size
I cannot imagine what it would take to come up with something unique in this millenium.
well a famous someone once said "all that was to be invented has already been invented". funny, after he finished blurting that we got the airplane, peniciline, the computer and the Web. it seems you have not learned anything from this foolish remark. but we have.
something unique for you : hotel net service offers personal attention, direct contact and online discussion with hotel managers, thousands of normally unlisted small family-run hotels, zero cost at booking time, content built and maintained by us, translations in dutch, german and portuguese paid for and administered by us.
our employees speak a minimum of 3 languages, our customer support and content translation staff speaks english, dutch, german, spanish, portuguese, french, greek and of course italian.
If you'll supply those URLs, we'll be more than happy to check on them. As you say, it's a sleazy industry and a lot of stuff has gotten past us in the past.
actually, our self-run and administered datacenter in Brazil is quite well equipped. our server farms in miami, new york and san antonio(texas) are also capable of a lot of work. but we don't have enough bandwidth and manpower to report every sleazy hotel URL you currently list.
the difference between spending a few million on content and ... not spending a few million on content is not to be sneezed at.
first of all we will not pay to be included in DMOZ. secondly the ammount spent on content is not a pre-requisite to be listed in DMOZ. thirdly our content is not cut+paste, as stated above. we allow hotels to enter their own information and we also actively participate in building the content.
if you've read this far i honestly thank you for your time, while i don't really expect to be listed on DMOZ i hope i've made it very clear to everyone reading this that we are a serious, hard working agency that is not involved in spam or mail list commerce as these gentlemen have explicitly accused us.
sincerely,
jose m. fonseca
cto / systems engineer
hotel net service srl
