e-Business and Commerce

Winner 

Rooms.lk

Product Description

Rooms.lk is a portal for facilitating the room bookings for mostly budget hotels in Sri Lanka. Hotel owners can post their hotel and hotel and booking information, with images and information on the facilities available on this site. An intended traveler can search for rooms by category, cities, grade and price. Rooms can be searched and sorted out by whether a visitor wants an adventure, beach, cultural, eco, entertainment, honeymoon, family or a shopping holiday. Rooms.lk also carries out special promotions on a Facebook page, extending the network into social media.

Jurors’ Evaluation

This portal is targeted at the budget conscious no-frills traveler. The site provides easy navigations and search based on type of activities a traveler wants to engage in thematically. The efforts made in promoting the site with creative videos etc., especially in keeping with the target audience and their interest was encouraging. The use of maps and the ability to geographically plan out tours is now essential for successful tourism. The portal acts as a source of information for travelers, but also provides the front end for publishing available rooms by those willing to put them up and the other backend systems required to manage the services for such providers. The ability to continuously execute this well will depend on the ability to attract more and more room vendors and tourists seeking budget and/or thematic travel experiences. The ability to explore both online and offline mediums for promotion and partnership will be crucial for its success.