Boo.com, a fashion related website, became one of the notables of the dot com burn out. The company burned through $120 million in just 18 months. Financial Times is reporting that the domain has got a new lease and has been bought by Ray Nolan founder of Web Reservations International (WRI), who is using the domain name for his new service, a hotel booking site. Nolan has quoted his reasons for using this domain to be:
It’s catchy, and it works across languages. Obviously there’s a lot of brand history, but when we told our staff we’d bought the Boo name most of them didn’t know what we were talking about.
The site combines hotel reservations with reviews, ratings, tagging and a focused search engine. Users could also see the hotels on Google maps. They are also targeting the advertisements depending upon whether a customer is interested in two star or five-star hotels, with advertisement pricing changing with the reservation dates. It is yet to be seen how Boo performs this time, but WRI which also operates hostelworld.com, recorded profits of €19 million for the previous year. Not bad in a world where companies get bought for millions without earning a dime.
