Headline: Tim Hentschel – Travel Technology Innovator – Visionary Leader
It’s been a long and winding road for third-generation hotelier Tim Hentschel, Co-Founder & CEO of HotelPlanner, a leading travel technology company. When he launched HotelPlanner.com in 2003 in San Diego at the height of the dot-com era, he had no idea where the journey might take him. 18 years later, he recently announced plans to take his company public on NASDAQ. This is his inspiring story.
‘When my co-founder John Prince and I started the company at age 24, it was the classic ‘business plan on a bar napkin’ kind of story you see in movies,’ says Tim. ‘We asked ourselves over beers one night what the biggest challenge in booking hotels was and the discovery came quickly (probably after the second beer): the group travel booking experience was just awful and was ripe for disruption.’
Back then, you had to get in touch with multiple hotel sales…