Skift Q&A: Can an independent hotel booking site survive and thrive?

The online hotel booking market is relatively packed, and standing out from the pack is difficult for any brand. The leadership at thirteen-year old Tablet Hotels, takes the position that each new entrant that may promise something new or unique is actually either a validation of its model or an opportunity to further evolve. Tablet Hotels features a limited number of hotels in nearly 900 destinations around the world. In a market like London, for instance, you'll find fewer than 60 properties, as opposed to over a thousand on Booking.com. The promise of Tablet is a specialty property at the lowest possible cost, and it has a history of delivering. In addition to the listings, Tablet's site also offers a magazine and a series of travel guides that offer a mix of inspiration and information that it hopes will help guests make smarter decisions before and after booking. Skift sat down earlier this month with Tablet Hotels CEO and co-founder Laurent Vernhes in the company's New York office. Skift: Can you talk a bit about the origins of Tablet Hotels? Laurent Vernhes: I got the idea to create Tablet out of need. I spent about ten years working as an expat in various parts of the world, but mostly Asia. I was traveling every week to a new location. Some consultants in the U.S. will go to Cincinnati for three months, and then to Cleveland, and then to Kansas City, or something. In my case, it was Bangkok, then Kuala Lumpur, Bombay, Jakarta. I was living in hotels, literally. When I decided to have that kind of career, my fantasy was to have a life like James Bond. I would have women all over in all of the cities Very quickly, I realized it was not going to be like that. Traveling for business is not that exciting. You have to work very hard to make it exciting. It's hard work. I didn't give up. I tried very hard to make traveling for business as a life exciting. I realized that part of that was picking your hotels carefully because the of region. Basically, there are two types of hotels. There are hotels that are commodity products; it's all about amenities, price, location. Then there are hotels that have soul, some personality, something, whether it's design, or it's with service. If travel is your way of life, it's important to find a hotel that has soul. It can be a big hotel, a small hotel. It's not the matter of size. It's not a matter if it's part of a chain or not part of chain. You just need to find a hotel. I w