That may seem an odd thing to say about the online travel agent (OTA) that was started in Phuket 13 years ago and which employs a couple of hundred people in its offices off Chao Fa East Rd, near Wat Tai.
The three principals in HH, CEO Blair Speers, Chief Technical Officer Graham Johnson and investor Stephen Baxter, recently received a payout of US$15 million in cash and US$10 million in shares in a buyout by Indian online travel giant MakeMyTrip (MMT).
Blair and Graham will stay on for three years, running the company and, depending on performance, garner as much as a further US$35 million in cash and stock, for a grand total of US$60 million (B1.8 billion).
In magnanimous mood after the buyout, Blair, originally from Canada, explained to The Phuket News how the company’s focus will change 180 degrees from the way it has operated so far.
“I guess it was selfish of me,” says Blair, “but I didn’t want to do business in the local market. I didn’t want hotel GMs calling me to complain while I was eating dinner.
“So instead of starting with a base here in Phuket and growing from there, we started out there – the whole world.”
It wasn’t a bad way to start. The company grew from tiny beginnings, with Blair sometimes “not knowing whether I could afford a new shirt”, to the point where it now has more than 200 employees, and had attracted four other buyout approaches before MMT – India’s biggest and most successful OTA – came along with a match that worked.
“We didn’t really need the money,” Blair says. “But now [with the MMT buyout] we have the opportunity to do what we want. All the ideas and innovation that we have, we’re ready to go after in the next three years. We didn’t need money from just anybody. We needed it from someone we could partner with and who really understood the business.”
Blair now admits that HT made a couple of mistakes along the way. Not company-killers, but big enough. And the buyout by MMT allows him to rectify them.
A major mistake, he says, was HT’s almost exclusive focus on the consumer. “The companies that have been more successful than us really got to know the industry and what the industry wanted.
“We were always focused on ‘consumer, consumer, consumer’. That’s all I cared about – giving the consumer the best information, the best technology we could.
“Our OTA competitors began to bring in travel professionals, people who really knew what was going on and when they did that, that connectivity in the industry gave them a lot more options.
“It took them from being the “black sheep” – the geeks that the traditional industry didn’t really want to know – to being facilitators and to being a massive part of the hotels’ revenue streams.
“We didn’t jump as fast as our competitors. It was a mistake. We believed that the destination marketing companies (DMCs) and major wholesalers and large travel companies would maintain the power to be able to guard the best rates for large groups of people.
“But as the hotels got more savvy in the online marketing capability, and as some of the other OTAs understood the trends – Phuket.com was one of the earlier ones – they started working direct with the hoteliers, and that really changed the face of things.”
By the time this sank in, it was 2008 and the global financial crisis had hit. The company went through a rough patch over the past four years because of this, and making the change of focus to the hotels and customers instead of customers alone would have been too expensive to make, he explains.
With the sale of HT finally agreed after 18 months of intense negotiations, Blair is looking forward to an exciting three years – that’s how long it is agreed he will continue to run the company, though if MMT are happy with the results he expects to stay longer.
He has already plunged into the new focus: making connections with hotels in Phuket. He and his team of half a dozen people are not hanging about. They have visited 100 hotels this week, and plan to hit another 1,000 in the next month.
Phuket will be the “cookie cutter”, the laboratory in which ideas will be tested and either used again in other markets or – if they don’t work so well – adjusted or simply thrown out.
MMT and HT are going to be watched very carefully by Agoda/Booking.com, Wotif and other big OTAs, he says. “If anything will make competitors shake in their boots it’s us, the top guys in the company, going into hotels to talk with the management.”
So far, he says, it’s going well. It’s high season, and the hotels are flat-out, but no one is turning down appointments with him and his crew. In fact, he says, “so far, everyone is jumping on board. These people are excited.”
Blair Speers may have gone from a salary of B35,000 a month 13 years ago to millions of dollars today, but he’s really only just getting started.
Meanwhile, the deal with MMT will not, he says, make a huge difference to his own life. “Money’s always meant security to me. I never thought about it any other way. I haven’t been looking at the prices of supercars, but it’s nice to go into a shop and not check the price of a shirt.”
“I used to be a price checker. Anytime I hit a city I’d check all the prices to see what it cost people to live there.” He also shops carefully for himself, and says he still gets the urge to check price tags.
“But now I resist it.”
He’s made one acquisition since the deal with MMT – he bought a new suit in London.
The past four years have been intense and have been tough on his family, though luckily, he says, his two sons, James, 14, and Austin, 11, are “both very laid-back”.
“The moment I sit down with them it seems like the whole world slows right down.” He is forced to slow down with it.
He doesn’t think he will be working shorter hours than before, “but I’ll be much more upbeat now”.
Perhaps his golf game will improve, too. It got to the point where he did not know until a couple of hours beforehand if he’d be able to play, so could never commit to a team or a tournament.
When he did get out to play, “I’d rush over to the course, grab a club and just hack away. I’ve gone from a 1-handicap to maybe a 10 or 11. I’m a terrible golfer right now. I have to apologise to my golfing buddies.” He seems to hope this will change soon.
And HT itself, under new ownership, also looks like upping its game considerably. This story’s far from over.