Hotel.de is sold

One of the largest online booking portals in Germany - hotel.de - was bought by another major player in the online booking market of the country - HRS Hotel Reservation Service. In total HRS Hotel Reservation Service acquired 61.6% of hotel.de AG shares. The deal price is amounted at 43.1 million Euros.

Currently HRS Hotel Reservation Service is the biggest hotel portal in Germany. The total number of users is about 6 million people per month. The company’s base includes 250 000 hotels in 180 countries.

Hotel.de is the second most popular resource of the online hotel industry in Germany. It is visited by about 4 million users per month. The resource hotel.de was founded in 2001. For the end of 2010 its turnover was amounted at 36 million Euros.

According to the agreement between the parties, the company will retain all the hotel.de staff and the location of offices will remain unchanged. It will be located, as always, in Nuremberg and Hamm. The total number of the hotel.de employees is currently 400 people.

Thanks to the merger HRS will be able to maneuver in field of pricing policy. It can be already said that many services of the portal will got chaper due to the "managed competition" between the two companies' services.

It should be noted that the purchase of the hotel.de by HRS was in some way sensational for Germany. Rumors that hotel.de will be sold in the near future have circulated on the market for a long time. However, the main potential buyer was Google. The main reasons for selling were poor financial performance. Thus, in the first half of 2011 losses of the hotel.de exceeded 800 000 Euros.