During our 20s my wife and I lived in D.C. and frequently visited NYC. We knew the best places to stay in D.C. were just outside the city, and found the same to be true for a lot of the hotels just outside of NYC in NJ. At the time we we’re living in an apartment overlooking the Ballston Metro, and that was the inspiration for our websites. Our LLC is 100% bootstrapped from our own revenue.
Our websites are objective and clever. Over the years we have received hundreds of emails with praise from visitors who serendipitously found our websites.
Our AI chatbots have also been used by AspenChamber (Visit Aspen) with great success. Our maps profiling hotels near transit have been routinely featured in both academic and popular travel publications.
After a few years of fine tuning we had arrived at the point where it was time to formalize as an LLC. We incorporated in 2017 and began to draw a second income form our LLC, as well as, drafting healthcare and often retirement savings.
Since incorporating we suffered a precipitous loss of search engine traffic as Google further entrenched its own products in search results. Even though our website maintains a strong presence in Google organic results, Google Ads, Answers, and Hotel Search Product have drastically reduced our access to the larger travel market. This has caused us to lose at least 25% of our revenue.
At large Google is a productive company, filled with talented people. We’re simply advocating that platforms this large be banned from preferencing their own products. No business like ours can survive if Google has walled off access to the average travel consumer.