Sam Shank: From horror films to hotels

 Sam Shank: From horror films to hotels

 

The big rivals like Booking.com and Hotels.com undoubtedly have bigger marketing budgets, he admits, so HotelTonight relies on making sure its product pleases customers by vetting all the hotels for quality, for example, and trying to make sure it offers the cheapest prices.
"In the history of HotelTonight we've spent less on marketing than our competitors spend in a single day," he says with a degree of pride.
As HotelTonight is still a private company, he wouldn't reveal revenue figures. "But it has been a goal of mine to take a business public," he says. "We're definitely on that trajectory, but we're probably a few years away from that yet."
Money has not been much of a motive, he claims. Instead, watching his company grow has been "unexpectedly fulfilling".
He describes the role of a boss as "setting ambitious but achievable goals", then letting people get on with the job. "You have to step back and trust the team," he concludes.
To think that if he'd stayed in Hollywood he might now be working on Scream 5.