The site Weekendhotel.nl was set up by Willem and Esme Vos: Willem has a background in travel and tourism and Esme in intellectual property law and Internet related matters.
We started Weekendhotel in April 2002 to help you find the best addresses for a weekend away. Like you, we became frustrated with typical booking sites that serve chain hotels desperate to dump their unsold inventory.
We were looking for something more personal and atmospheric, a site that would bring together the most charming hotels and B&B’s with character. Because we did not find such a site, we decided to create our own and weekendhotel.nl was born.
How they work is explained more in detail here.
In order to enhance the usability of the site Willem has built a simple inventory database for available rooms that each hotelier can keep up to date. Thus the user of the site can easily make a choice for a hotel to stay. The only problem is the maintenance of the data. The Hoteliers have to keep the inventory up to date almost daily or at least each time the inventory changes. This in itself is a nightmare for hoteliers of a small size hotel/B&B, especially when he has to allocate inventory over several sites where rooms can be booked on line…. Consequently the inventory of Weekendhotel is not always 100% up to date.
In 2005 a couple of graduates of a Dutch Hotel School have set up Hoteliers.nl (which is the same as Hoteliers.com) in cooperation with the Dutch Horeca Association to which association many Dutch Hotels belong, in order to create a possibility for hotels and B&B’s to be bookable on line. Both via the sites of Hotelier, but also via a link with Hotelier through their own site. The hotels pay a moderate monthly fee for the use of the site rather than the commissions they have to pay to the bigger portals. The site grows and works satisfactorily.
Weekendhotel.nl is more the content site and has details about approximately 1200 small Dutch and Belgian hotels and B&b’s and approximately 6000 unique visitors per day. Hotelier.nl is more the technically driven site that since inception has now approximately 600 participants including hotels belonging to chains or conglomerates.
Recently, the two have officially announced their cooperation whereby the site Weekendhotel.nl is linked with the inventory system of Hotelier.nl. If the hotelier wishes to have his property on both sites, he only has to maintain his inventory on the Hotelier.nl site.
I am glad with this new development to which, in the background, I could contribute a bit.