DealBase raises $1million in Series A funding

The deal hunting and publicising websites are appearing everywhere and launching in new markets constantly. In Australia alone we have had TravelZoo and Cheapflights rushing into this crowded and relatively small market.

News today that hotel deal/offer aggregation site Dealbase has raised $1 million in Series A funding from Russ Siegelman, an Affiliated Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Bob Zipp, Managing Director of Amicus Capital and Josh Hannah, General Partner at Matrix Partners and former CEO of eHow.com.

Dealbase.com was one of the BOOT pick's for the final six at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit. I chose it because it is has spent time and energy on the display layer. This has resulted in a great browsing and filtering experience generated by the common layout in terms of description, savings etc for each offer and deal. Makes it much easier for the customer to make the necessary comparisons. I am also very impressed by the self loading approach for hotels and inventory providers - at no cost. Is very different to the paid offer approaches of TravelZoo, Cheapflights and others. As with all these things distribution will be the key - especially if they get caught in an arbitrage traffic position where they try to buy traffic from Google at a price cheaper than they sell it to hoteliers. Are currently claiming a 100,000 visitors in March (puts into perspective my 3 years to get 100,000 visitors).

As a reminder here is the Dealbase.com pitch by CEO Sam Shank at the PhoCusWright summit.