Serial entrepreneur Morten Sondergaard was born in 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the founder of more than 50 companies over the past 20 years. He started his career in the chemical industry out in Scandinavia. After selling his first business, he moved into high tech telecommunications in the late 80’s, creating various companies in Denmark, Germany, Spain, Morocco, San Marino, United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Brazil. All of Morten's companies operated in the wholesale and value added service sector.
In the late 90’s ventures from within the telecommunications market lead to the creation of various Internet startups, such as SMS and Digital TV companies. Morten has surfed and enjoyed these and the latest waves of prosperity – not least on the Internet. In the last couple of years Morten stopped always eating the whole cake himself realizing that it is much more exciting to share the success being an active investor instead of owning and controlling everything himself --- a shift that creates more value and bigger smiles.
As well as new technology companies, Morten Sondergaard has a passion for quality property developments in Majorca, Spain. He Lives in Majorca, London, Copenhagen and just occasionally in Cyberspace. Check out Morten's website to learn more about him, the companies and so on.
I came across some of Morten's travel websites last month when I was doing research... After finding some of his various company names more than a few dozen times on different occassions in the whois records of the domains I was kinda intrigued and thought to myself... Hmm.. Wow there is some kind of a pattern here --- This company has tons of domains that are actually fully developed. So, after a bit of digging into this discovery I found out that they snapped up approximately 60,000 domains more or less earlier this year it looks like for this project that is called AboutAnywhere.com where you can "Book a hotel room Just About Anywhere".
Morten's companies or maybe this ones that he has invested heavily in, which it looks like, that are in charge of operations for this network are About Travel Ltd which is based in Great Britain and the second one, About Travel Inc is based out of Miami Florida. They have choosen Fabulous.com as their registrar of choice to control/manage and keep secure all of their 10,000's of domain names.
As for the content and technology backend they choose to go with The Interactive Affiliate Network which is a pretty popular choice amongst travel website operators or in other words affiliates, other webmasters and publishers looking to create a whitelabel website and to quickly and easily deploy a powerful product and solution to handle all aspects of the operation and power up multiple sites without doing too much customization and hard work. The IAN is a division of Hotels.com and the company is a leading provider of affiliate marketing services and has been involved in the travel affiliate market since for over a decade now!
Hotels.com is owned by InterActiveCorp or otherwise known as just IAC --- a U.S. based multi billion dollar media conglomerate which operates diversified businesses in sectors being strongly influenced by the internet which is headed by Barry Diller. See for yourself some of the examples of the actual websites of Morten's About Anywhere network that I am talking about:
about-miami-hotels.com |
bargainhotelsinmiami.com |
brooklyn-hotels.net |
hotelsinsydney.org |
about-moscowhotels.com |
about-londonhotels.com |
cheaphotelsparis.net |
hoteldealsrome.com |
The location specific domains aren't the best of the best keyword domain names for the most popular destinations because the best ones have been registered already of course for many years but they contain the same keyword patterns all across, which is usually "about" and followed by a dash or "cheap" as well as "deals". They do however have quiet a few of good domains reserved for plenty of locations where the domain is "locationhotels" or "hotelslocation" and ends with a .com/.net/.org --- an example is WhitePlainsHotels.net which is a city located a short 30 minute drive from NYC.
There are over 200,000 searches for "White Plains Hotels" performed monthly on both Google and Yahoo. Another example is for Mahwah, a city in New Jersey that is not too far away from NYC --- approximately 45 mins by car and 1 hour by train and there is 10,000's of searches for "mahwah hotels" done monthly and they have managed to secure the domain MahwahHotels.com --- nice pick up! So now you probably understand why I kept running into his names, eh? Yep, I was trying to grab some of this names myself in the NY/NJ/CT area for a client but it looked like Morten's company had already did a clean sweep of the best of the best keyword domain names.
Although the .net's and .org's are still available as well as some of the singular version ones. I wanted the .com's though :) Oh well. This just goes to show you that there is still plenty of good keyword domain names to be had if you do the research... Seriously! Some of the domains he was able to grab are worth $10,000's+ and surely get natural type in traffic.
So anyways, where was I... Yea --- The websites only have a few different designs/layout templates shared between them and the content is all pretty unique for each city, region, country and so on. I don't really know why they have 4 or 5 websites setup and sometimes even more for the same city/town but they do... I'm not a big fan of dupes but I guess when you are trying to create the largest website travel network in the world made up of 50,000+ sites you don't care about having dupes as long as you meet that magic number which you were shooting for and I believe for Morten and his company it was somewhere around 60,000.
In his press releases they claim to operate 40,000... But according to my research it is more than that. The websites offer hotel bookings of course as well as hotel reviews, special/exclusive deals... Also car rentals, flight reservations, local vacation guides, vacation packages and rentals, etc. They are setup pretty nicely and are all functional from what it looks like although I did not place an actual booking through them for anything.
On the search engine optimization end, they aren't all that "seo friendly" and I don't really have anything positive to say about the way things currently are but they do seem to be generating some light traffic all together. It's hard to estimate how much they are making but I'm pretty sure that they aren't quiet profitable yet. The whole operation is still at it's very early stages and has a long way to go before anything getting too excited about.
Morten has tried to play up the press a bit in order to generate some buzz and traffic to this network and released a few press releases for each individual website... Some pretty clever ones I must say such as New York Hotels and About Anywhere. Also the websites are setup with "user" based reviews where any visitor can post whatever they want. It's just a traditional blog... I believe most local business owners would actually be interested in submitting content and information about their hotel/motel/inn or restaurant if they become aware of this network of sites --- so this is a pretty good idea and feature to have on any website.
This is actually where most of their traffic may be generated at the end of the day. The network does have potential and should do quiet well if they continue tweaking things, put a little more effort into it and do invest some money into proper advertising but it still has a long ways to go before it is actually making real money. Morten has a lot of businesses online and offline and he is involved with many other companies it looks like but It's only been a few month's since going live with this so whether this vision of his actually becomes another success --- Has yet to be seen of course... It is too early too call. I'll do another write up on this network in another year or so maybe with an update on how things have progressed. It should be interesting. This network is one of the largest developed website networks in the world obviously.
My gut feeling is that Morten is the one really behind the whole operation and calling the shots from the top with a small team backing him up doing all of the tech stuff --- Otherwise why would he be so excited and publishing the press releases himself and so on... Maybe not though? Brings a whole new meaning to "active investor" as he calls himself, as of recently. Anyways, whatever the case may be... It doesn't matter really... I wish Morten and the About Travel group all the best. It was a very bold move on their part to make this type of commitment and I am sure they are in it long term which is why I feel that it was worth writing this piece about their whole operation.
The guys who operate the Cities Unlimited network have done real well over the years operating their network of some 20,000 local geographic USA cities/towns targeted websites... This travel network has the right talent and people behind it so I don't see why in 1 - 2 years time it can't be a major player in the online Travel business if things start "happening" for them.
Observations at WannaDevelop.com
02/23/2010: Dozens of Amazon affiliate stores for sale.. Developed by DomainMassDevelopment.com 01/11/2010: Wanna be part-owner of DomainState.com with myself and a few others? Ok, read this now... 11/02/2009: FS gets it on with WP... It's about time, no??!?! 08/24/2009: If all else fails... Who is gonna pay the bills?!! 08/22/2009: Frank Schilling has the winning formula $$$$$$
