Ask HN: Need help monetizing our site - suggestions (pivot or otherwise) welcome

Dingadeal.com lets groups get hotel deals. Groups (> 8 people) enter their accommodation requirements, and let hotels bid for their custom. Hotels are notified and have 24 hours to reply via the website with their best offer.

The group views & chooses the best hotel deal. They can accept the offer on the website, at which point the hotel is notified & supplied with the group's contact details. The hotel contacts the group to finalize the arrangements.

Our revenue model is commission-based. We don't accept payments on the site, so we invoice the hotel for a certain % after the group has stayed. Two main problems we're facing:

1. Invoicing hotels after the group has stayed. Due to the nature of group bookings, requirements can change between when they book on the site and when they stay in the hotel. For example, the number of people in the group can fluctuate. We rely on the group for feedback on how many ended up staying, what was the final price etc. It's messy to work out the commission we should charge the hotel.

2. Conversions rates on the site are extremely low. Conversion rates for a big online group booking competitor are around the 1% mark. That gives you an idea of where we're at. It's easy for the group to look at all the offers and then continue with their booking offline. There is no major incentive to complete the booking via our website. We do offer features such as group invoicing, but group organisers are rarely getting that far in the booking process.

So, based on those two issues, we're looking for alternative means of generating revenue. Some things in our favour:

- We generate a decent amount of targeted traffic via our blog, so we can get the right people to our site

- Group bookings is a lucrative area for hotels, so they do tend to make offers, even when the conversion rates are so low

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks.

To increase your dollars per conversion: You need to add other travel related services that pay an affiliate commission. Some examples are:

Taxi/Limo services Concierge Services Meal vouchers/deals Airline tickets Tour packages etc.

To increase your conversion rate: Get a valid SSL certificate and redirect all visitors to SSL via .htaccess Remove or minimize everything on the homepage not related to conversion (with the exception of the G+ and FB buttons). Use Groupon as an an extreme example of this. Start a Adwords remarketing campaign to follow your unconverted visitors as thet browse other sites in the Google Content network.

Those are the things that immediately come to mind.

Maybe charge a flat rate for ranges of people. That way you don't need to be exact. Charge the hotel $100 if 5-10 people booked and $250 if 11-20 booked, or whatever. Just make the math work out to be roughly what you'd make if things were exact. Maybe you can earn even more like this.

Thanks for you feedback. An affiliate partnership would certainly be interesting. How would you go about setting this up? Would you use something like Commission Junction?

One area we are exploring is in relation to partnering with other travel-related services. A selling point for us is that regardless of whether a group accepts a hotel's deal or not, we know that this group will more than likely be in a certain town on a certain date.

So, when a group registers on the site, we can have an opt-in email option. Travel-related services in the locality then have a chance to advertise to this group via an email sent to the group prior to arrival. "10% discount on golf for your group this weekend in X Golf Club". Things like that.

We're trying to tease out a few different revenue models, so thanks for your suggestions.

That's not a bad suggestion. However, it still doesn't overly help with conversions. If groups are coming onto our site for quotes and then going off directly to finalize the booking. We need to start increasing our conversion rate and thus increase the revenue we do generate through the site. However, a flat fee is not a bad idea as it does remove the issue of fluctuating numbers.