It promised hotels that “whether you’re a highly-rated resort, boutique hotel, lakeside cabin, beach cottage, winery villa, or other noteworthy property, get discovered by travelers with Amazon Destinations”.
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The site specialized in selling hotels for weekend getaways within driving distance.
The Amazon Destinations travel and hotel booking service is apparently at the end of its journey, as the website quietly shut down just six months after launch.
The closure was first noticed by the retailer’s hometown newspaper, the Seattle Times. Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, of course, had been one of the first cities supported on the hotel-booking platform.
Four months after going live, the service was reaching 35 cities, Amazon said at the time of its last expansion. The service faced heavy competition against established players in the online travel business, including TripAdvisor, Airbnb, Expedia, Groupon and other sites.
“Effective 13 October 2015, Amazon Destinations stopped selling hotel breaks in the United Kingdom”. The fresh site had an arrangement between Amazon and its hotel partners by dishing out a bigger listing of hotel deals.
As Amazon states, if you have made any bookings prior to their service shutting down, they will continue to be valid and honored, so fret not if you think you’ve snagged a good deal but are anxious that it is now moot.
The company has not offered a reasoning behind the shutdown at this point, but it’s likely that the site wasn’t finding the traction Amazon had hoped.
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“We have learned a lot and have chose to discontinue Amazon Destinations”, a company spokesperson said in a statement yesterday (Oct. 14), Bloomberg reported.
