A new themed restaurant, Tiana's Palace, is opening Thursday at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California.
25.08.2023 - 13:58 / skift.com / Steve Hafner / Dennis Schaal
Serial entrepreneur Paul English is back again with a new app called Deets, and he’s trying to disrupt the way people discover restaurants and hotels.
English, who co-founded both Kayak, which sold to Booking Holdings for $1.8 billion in 2013, and Lola, which offloaded its assets to Capital One in 2021 for an undisclosed sum, called Tripadvisor and Yelp reviews “garbage” in a Skift interview, and said he hopes to use natural language processing, AI and machine learning to summarize and streamline reviews personalized for each user in Deets. The tagline is “your favorite places.”
He asked me to search Google for “buy Amazon reviews,” and there were 41,000 results, meaning fake reviews are for sale. The same search for Tripadvisor generates 7,560 results and there are 14,300 for Yelp. On the review integrity front, Tripadvisor has a team to intercept fraudulent reviews, and its CEO believes its user reviews are part of an “enduring foundation” for revitalizing the company.
Deets, which debuted last year, is unimpressive in its current incarnation as it shows a limited number of restaurants with sometimes-one-sentence reviews and photos for dining establishments in Boston and New York City. I left a 4.0 review for a restaurant I never heard of or visited to see how it worked. English said an app update is coming in about a week.
The idea is to cut through user review clutter and the “analysis paralysis” that comes with having to wade through a long feed in order to choose a restaurant or hotel, English said. Deets might pick five restaurants that your friends or foodies you follow like in Miami, and then modify the choices based on personalization and polls run through the app, he added.
Deets currently has a partnership with OpenTable, the dining app run by Debby Soo and overseen by English’s co-founder at Kayak, Steve Hafner, and there will be more partnerships to come.
English sees Deets as a big business opportunity. But it’s a long road to evolve from just another app, to break out of the pack, and turn a startup into to a meaningful enterprise.
English is a serial entrepreneur, as detailed in a 2016 Tracy Kidder biography, A Truck Full of Money. The title comes from one of his years-long collaborators at Kayak and earlier startups saying he wanted to be standing next to English when he gets hit by a truck full of money, and Kayak was such a vehicle.
Deets is one of five apps coming out of English’s development studio, Boston Venture Studio.
In addition to Deets, he retained rights to the Lola brand when its assets were sold to Capital One, and English said he’s turning it into a dating app with the name pertaining to “love language.” English said he spends a couple of hours per week working on a
A new themed restaurant, Tiana's Palace, is opening Thursday at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, September 6. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
September 5 was the first day of New York City’s short-term rental registration rules, but the city’s electronic verification system isn’t operational yet, Skift has learned from three sources familiar with the new process.
If you search for short-term rentals on Booking.com, Vrbo and, to a lesser extent, on Airbnb in New York City for stays after Tuesday’s deadline mandating that hosts be registered, you’ll still find numerous listings that seemingly flout the rules.
Thousands of Airbnb listings could be at risk after September 5 when New York City has said it will begin to enforce its host registration law regarding short-term rentals. Estimates are a moving target.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Tuesday, August 29. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
New York City’s Office of Special Enforcement has approved only 257 short-term rental host registrations — out of 3,250 applications — ahead of a September 5 enforcement deadline.
If you follow the short-term rental industry, you would have read or heard Sonder touting itself as “a leading next-generation hospitality company that is redefining the guest experience through technology and design” countless times.
Ten years ago this week, on November 9, 2012, the Priceline Group (today’s Booking Holdings) announced a deal to acquire Kayak, the Connecticut-based metasearch engine, which had been a public company for less than four months.
Just when travelers thought that travel disruptions seen earlier this year may be easing, in May 2023 the European Union plans to introduce new fingerprint and biometric checks at external borders for third-country nationals that could lead to significantly longer wait times.
On the Beach Group CEO Simon Cooper, who founded the UK-based beach holidays online travel agency in 2004, will resign his post within the next 12 months, and Chief Financial Officer Shaun Morton will take over the CEO duties, the company announced.
UnderTheDoormat Group CEO Merilee Karr said her company’s new technology and distribution agreement with Visit Oman can be a novel approach to short-term regulation — one where technology can spur governments to embrace the sector rather than shun it.