Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

The Merrcury Engine, the software behind LetMeGo, is divided into “scopes“. The Marrley Scope, named in honor of Bob Marley, refers to the systems that handle all bookings created by travelers when they accept a lodging’s bid for their business. We have finished developing this scope, and it has passed its QA tests, so it is ready for implementation. However, a few other scopes must be completed before we can allow Marrley to go live.

These are some of the cool features of Marrley:

• Streamlined bookings: Marrley is designed to support LetMeGo’s “no upsells” approach. In other words, when you book lodging through LetMeGo, you won’t have to slog through offers for travel insurance, magazines, etc.
• LetMeGo will only offer guaranteed, lodging-confirmed bookings: Some users of the major online travel agencies have arrived at a lodging only to discover that the staff never received their reservation notice. In order to avoid these unpleasant surprises, LetMeGo requires lodgings to manually confirm bookings.
• No tolerance whatsoever for lodgings that overbook and thereby inconvenience our travelers.

And the tech features:

• Kick-ass security: Not only will LetMeGo be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, but we go above and beyond its requirements by proactively deleting travelers’ credit card information a few days after the booking has been processed.
• 200% code coverage: Almost every action in every use case of Marrley is tested via both unit tests and automated Selenium tests (this is the first scope of the Merrcury Engine that features said levels of quality assurance).

The user interfaces of Marrley were designed by Javier “Maestro” Mesa early this year, coded for approx five months by Andres “Falkon” Herrera using test-driven development, and tested and tweaked by Sergio “Alucard” Perilla for around eight weeks. The language was edited by Brett McCallon. Thank you guys!

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. Here is the current status of all the subsystems and scopes required for the release of our private beta:

Progress of the Merrcury Engine
Scope	Status
Web Subsystem	Ready for the private beta!
Morrison Subsystem	Ready for the private beta!
Cockerr Subsystem	Ready for the private beta!
Hendrrix Scope (account management)	Ready for the private beta!
Sinatrra Scope (lodging listing management)	Ready for the private beta!
Arrmstrong Scope (destination management)	Ready for the private beta!
Rrose Scope (this one is a secret)	Ready for the private beta!
Charrly Scope (email campaign management)	Ready for the private beta!
Mozarrt Scope (conversation management)	98% of coding and QA for the private beta
Mastrropiero Scope (search management)	Ready for the private beta!
Kubrrick Scope (itinerary management)	98% of coding and QA for the private beta
Brrown Scope (offer management)	99% of coding and QA for the private beta
Marrley Scope (booking management)	Ready for the private beta!

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed will already know this, but I spent the majority of last week attending, for the first time, the PhoCusWright conference, which is one of the premier annual meetings of professionals in the travel technology industry. I felt it might be useful to write out some of my ideas and observations about this event, so that both the members of the LetMeGo team, and those of you who are following the development of LetMeGo, might gain some knowledge about how this particular group of professionals view the current state of the industry.

Part of the production team of the PhoCusWright Conference (picture by Uptake.com/Elliottng)

Firstly, it’s worth noting that this was the best-run conference I’ve ever attended. Given that it was also the most expensive conference I’ve ever attended, as well, that seems appropriate. There were plenty of networking opportunities for attendees, as well, and I came home with a huge stack of business cards. On the other hand, I felt the majority of conference presenters did not completely understand many of the most important social media. While Twitter was on everyone’s lips, no one mentioned any of the powerful, traveler-focused social networks (like Couchsurfing). I hate to judge people based on their choice of clothing, but this was one of the most suit-heavy events I’ve attended; there is, perhaps, some connection between more formal dress, and overlooking cutting-edge social networks. Someone call the Freakonomics guys!

Day One: The Travel Innovation Summit

The chief activity on the first day was 32 presentations by various companies (each of which had paid $10,000 for the privilege). Unfortunately for their marketing budgets, most of these made relatively little impression (at least on this attendee). However, there were a few truly innovative companies presenting. One of these was Gliider, another New York-based service that I helped to beta test; another was SpeedRFP, which is a service whose model is similar to LetMeGo’s, but is focused on large events. The winner was Amadeus IT, a large (8,500 employees) company better known for its GDS, which created a map-based system to find flights and fares.

Main stage of the PhoCusWright Conference (picture by Uptake.com/Elliottng)

The other highlight of the first day, from my perspective, was meeting some really great people at that night’s networking events. I met a number of other travel-related startup founders from around the world, along with venture capitalists and others.

Days Two and Three

With the contest portion of the conference over, I attended a number of sessions that discussed travel-related topics in detail. One of the most interesting, from LetMeGo’s perspective, revealed that PhocusWright expects the U.S. lodging industry to continue suffering until 2012. For online lodging agencies, this is good news. Struggling lodgings are more open to the idea of working with new services to earn additional revenue, and travelers are interested in using services like ours to take advantage of low prices and greater choice.

There were several keynote speeches, as well as interviews with important players in the industry. Speakers included the founders and/or CEOs of companies like Expedia, Priceline, Kayak, Travelocity, and Orbitz, among others. Each used his designated 30 minutes of speaking time to justify the strategies his company employed over the preceding year, and to remind everyone in the audience why his company is superior to all of the others. I found most of these speakers to be fairly arrogant, but one stood out as less so: Barney Harford, the Orbitz CEO, is both the youngest and the most progressive of the presenters. He and I agree on the need for inclusive pricing, and he is behind opencuba.org.

Many of the new contacts I met during these two days were company founders and/or key players from the Latin American market, which up to this point seems to have been forgotten by the big online travel agencies. Again, this oversight should prove good for agencies like ours.

Take-Aways from the Conference

Most of the people to whom I mentioned the idea behind LetMeGo seemed very interested in it. Based on this interest, we may consider presenting LetMeGo at next year’s summit. On the downside, most technologies and strategies presented at the conference assume that real-time pricing and very fast booking are key to building strong businesses. In this, I hope they are wrong–LetMeGo is built upon the idea that people will be willing to wait a few hours before booking a lodging, in exchange for custom, socially responsible experiences at an equivalent or lower price.

I expected that the PhoCusWright conference would allow me to meet many other geeks, like me, obsessed with technology innovation in the travel industry. That wasn’t the case–most attendees were of a more corporate, established mindset, and little that was presented was as cutting-edge as I had hoped.  Notwithstanding, the conference’s strong networking, insights into potential strategies, and overall atmosphere were a pleasant surprise.  I look forward to attending next year’s PhocusWright in Scottsdale, Arizona. I hope to see you there.

Since we are getting ready to release LetMeGo to the general public, we need to be ready to properly help all users of LetMeGo who will inevitably need assistance. To ensure that our customer service is top-notch, we have assembled a great operations team. First it was Gigi, then we added Treeny. Now, Carmen Tejeda has become our latest Customer Service aMeGo! Carmen is an experienced customer service professional: she has supervised customer service and account management teams in several companies, including Voice123, a company I cofounded. She’s got what it takes to make sure our travelers are always happy!

Welcome to the team, Carmen!

Many lodgings, in a number of countries, have asked us to figure out a system that would allow them to get bookings through LetMeGo even if they don’t accept credit cards.

For those who made this request, we have very good news. We no longer require that our lodging partners accept credit cards. However, these lodgings will not be allowed to collect advanced payments from travelers (learn why). So as long as you don’t require advanced payments, you can use LetMeGo without accepting credit cards!

If you are a lodging staff member, please be sure to update your lodging listing to reflect the payment methods you accept, including cash. This will ensure that you are fully ready to receive bookings when the service goes live.

To do that:

1. Go to the “My Lodgings” area.
2. Click on the “Update Listing Details” link (on the right).
3. Go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Payment Methods” section.

Thanks,

Alexander Torrenegra

In October, a new developer came on board: Alberto Dominguez (@simpleprojectz). Alberto was hired by Torrenegra Labs, the parent company of LetMeGo, to do some research. As part of his training, he joined the LetMeGo team for a while; this allowed him to become accustomed to the RRapido Methodology and the Merrcury Engine. Among the several areas in which he helped us was the implementation of a special feature that is integral to the upcoming private beta test. It allows us to provide some testers with unilmited access to all of LetMeGo’s features, while limiting others testers to a smaller feature set. Thank you, Alberto!

By the way, if you would like to apply to become a beta tester during the private beta, please email me at alex[åt]torrenegra[døt]com. If you are selected, I’ll send you an access code as soon as the private beta goes live.

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. As usual, here is the current status of all the subsystems and scopes required for the release of our private beta:

Progress of the Merrcury Engine
Scope	Status
Web Subsystem	Ready for the private beta!
Morrison Subsystem	Ready for the private beta!
Cockerr Subsystem	Ready for the private beta!
Hendrrix Scope (account management)	99% of QA for the private beta
Sinatrra Scope (lodging listing management)	98% of coding and QA for the private beta
Arrmstrong Scope (destination management)	97% of QA for the private beta
Rrose Scope (this one is a secret)	Ready for the private beta!
Charrly Scope (email campaign management)	Ready for the private beta!
Mozarrt Scope (conversation management)	97% of QA for private beta
Mastrropiero Scope (search management)	Ready for the private beta!
Kubrrick Scope (itinerary management)	95% of coding and QA for the private beta
Brrown Scope (offer management)	97% of QA for private beta
Marrley Scope (booking management)	97% of QA for private beta