Is Room 77 Pivoting or Is It Just Changing Its Marketing Strategy?

If you consider  Web analytics, then Room 77, the hotel metasearch site founded in 2010, looks as though it has fallen off the face of the earth. Web analytics firms can be notoriously unreliable in their trackings, but Room 77's desktop traffic numbers over the last few months as measured by SimilarWeb, Quantcast, Compete and comScore, all point to a similar downward spiral. What's going on? Is a pivot under way or is something else at play? The questions arise in light of the fact that Room 77 has been putting a lot of its public relations efforts of late into marketing its CheckMate business, a mobile hotel check-in service for hotels and distributors that Room 77 acquired in March 2013 around the time it brought in former Jetsetter CEO Drew Patterson as Room 77 CEO. After Jetsetter, Patterson had served as CheckMate CEO, and was a co-founder. Checkmate is thought to be in modest growth mode, and is doing some hiring after forging relationships with a few hotels, including Commune Hotels + Resorts, MetWest Terra Hospitality, and Pacific Hospitality Group, among others. The drop-off in Room 77 traffic, along with the public emphasis being placed on CheckMate, comes after Room 77 founder Brad Gerstner spoke at