OpenTable was the special of the day on Wall Street on Thursday.
The restaurant-reservation company's stock soared on its first day of trading on Nasdaq, gaining nearly 60 percent to close at $31.89 after selling 3 million shares at $20 a share during its initial public offering Wednesday. Nearly 5 million shares changed hands, trading as high as $35.50.
OpenTable's stock performance is the biggest first-day gain for an IPO since energy-management systems firm Orion Energy Systems gained 65 percent in its debut in December 2007, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.
OpenTable's revenue comes from monthly subscription fees charged to restaurants for access to the company's service, as well as a $1 fee paid by restaurants for each seated guest derived from reservations made on OpenTable's site.
The company earned 2 cents per share on nearly $16 million in revenue in the quarter ended March 31, 2009, and lost 10 cents per share on revenue of $13.2 million in 2008.
The San Francisco-based company says it has 10,000 restaurant customers around the world and has seated more 100 million diners since its inception in 1998.
One of our favorite sites, the airfare prediction site Farecast, is spreading its wings today and launching a beta pricing service for hotels as well. The service works for the top 30 U.S. travel destinations.
Using hotel inventory data from partner sites Orbitz, Cheaptickets, and ReserveTravel, as well as from its own historical database, Farecast can now tell you which hotels in the area you're looking to book are good deals, and which are not. And, just as it does with airfares, Farecast can tell you which hotels' prices are likely to be better if you change the dates of your stay.
Step 1: Find the red hotels at your destination. Those are the good deals.
Farecast displays hotels that match your search on a Microsoft-powered map. Bookings that are good deals (reservations that cost less than they normally do for the particular hotel) are color-coded in red. Poor deals are in blue. If you click on any hotel, you get a graph that shows how the hotel's prices fluctuate over the days before and after your trip.
Step 2: See if your hotel's prices are better before or after your planned dates.
(Credit: CNET Networks)It's interesting that Farecast doesn't color-code by price, but rather by amount of discount from the historical average. Thus a $400 booking can be a better "deal" than a $200 hotel--however, the high-priced lodging is likely to be at a five-star hotel, while the cheaper room can be found at a lower-quality location.
The system will let you know, visually, if you're traveling at a bad time. If all the hotels you're looking at are bad deals, there's a good chance that there's an event in town that's driving up prices. Farecast also has data about local events, Farecast's Mike Fridgen told me, but it doesn't display this information in this beta.
This new hotel price-finder feature is quite useful, and Farecast does an extremely good job of displaying its data and predictions. I would recommend using it for your next booking.
(The one thing I really would like to see added is integration with Farecast's airfare system. It'd be even more useful if the site could combine airfare and hotel info to help you pick the best dates for a trip. That's on the road map, Fridgen said.)
Somewhat related: Rentometer (review) and Zillow (previous coverage).
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