Getaroom Gives Up on Brand-Building and Pivots to B2B
Skift Take
There's nothing wrong with a startup pivot. Even successful online travel industry veterans Bob Diener and David Litman had to change the trajectory of Getaroom.com when they realized their initial assumptions didn't work.
If anyone remembers the Getaroom.com jingle and TV commercial of 2010 [embedded below] then you'll be interested to know that the five-year-old startup, co-founded by Hotels.com co-founders Bob Diener and David Litman, is singing a different tune these days.
Getaroom started out trying to build a consumer brand, but the company, which is profitable, pivoted over the last year into providing back-end technology and forging affiliate relationships with partners, including NewOrleans.com, Kayak, TripAdvisor and others, says Diener, Getaroom co-founder and president.
Diener and Litman, Cornell Law School friends and business partners since 1991, know something about the travel and hotel business from their pre-Internet days to the current online and mobile jumble.
Diener didn't articulate it this way, but there are tons of lessons for travel startups in the evolution of Getaroom.com and in the Diener-Litman journey.
After all, in 1991, prior to founding Getaroom.com in 2009 after a non-compete agreement expired, Litman and Diener co-founded the Hotel Reservations Network, which eventually went pubic, changed its name to Hotels.com and ended up as an Expedia Inc. brand, making the two co-founders very rich in the process.
In their heyday, Diener and Litman were rock stars in the online tra
