The man who found there's room for more

By Alex Murdoch
March 1, 2005
Graeme Wood, the founder of, knew he had a winning concept from the start.


Imitation will always be the sincerest form of flattery for founder Graeme Wood. As creator and chief executive of the world's first last-minute online accommodation booking centre, Wood says he thrives on the competition provided by those jumping on his bandwagon.

"Competition doesn't do us any harm, especially when big brands like Qantas decide they want to compete with us - that's good, that gives us credibility in the marketplace," Wood says.

"And when they don't make much impact on us, they just strengthen our position further."

The website revolves around a 14-day constantly updated accommodation availability system allowing customers to log on and choose where and when they want to stay.

Wood says had gone from strength to strength, with more than 65 employees in 36 countries and raking in an estimated 1.2 million bookings a year.

Not bad for a local dotcom company that began in a shoebox-sized Brisbane office.

Wood says he stumbled onto the idea of while consulting to a major hotel chain about six years ago.

He says the chain had been unable to offload its vacant rooms at the last minute, thinking their issue to be pricing related. "Their problem was when they had cancellations, especially late cancellations, they couldn't find a cost-effective way to get their marketing message to the consumer," Wood says.

"We talked it over for a while, and it became apparent to me that they didn't have a pricing problem - they had a marketing problem."

Wood says that although the chain was prepared to drop the price of its rooms, the cost of getting the message out to the market was way too high.

He says that with his experience with the internet, combining the two had been the next logical step.

"If we could use the internet to get this good news out to the marketplace immediately, we could create a market that simply wasn't performing at the time," he says.

Wood knew he had a successful concept right from the start, creating a win-win situation for all concerned.

Hotels would be earning money on rooms that would otherwise be vacant, while consumers would be nabbing a great deal on dramatically discounted accommodation.

But paradoxically, the major hotel chains, including the one involved in getting the ball rolling, initially refused to get on board.

So Wood canvassed smaller independent groups that, while still sceptical, decided to give it a go.

"Once it started to work for them, the bigger chains progressively realised they couldn't stay out of it," he says.

"So they reluctantly, in some cases, started to join us, and then, as the results started to flow, they all wanted to be on."

Even the September 11 attacks and the SARS epidemic could not stop the company's growth.

"If the hotels have empty rooms, they're keener to sell, so they drop their prices or add extra value," he says.

"We tend to do OK no matter whether it's busy or very slow."

Wood says one thing they had learnt was not to take the Australian public for granted.

Aussies are early technology adopters, far more at ease with snapping up cyber discounts than any other country in the world.

"There are differences. People (in the rest of the world) just don't go out and do things as readily as they do in Australia," he says.



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