Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Agoda (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Best arguments are from Cunard and AquaDTRS Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  14:59, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Agoda
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Half of this is a series of press releases, which is not encyclopedic material. The second half is a collection of consumer complaints, which are also not encyclopedic material.  DGG ( talk ) 05:11, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Singapore-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 00:37, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 00:37, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.  This is a 12-page case study.  </li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> <li></li> </ol>

<ol> <li> This is a 12-page case study. The abstract notes: "Rob Rosenstein, the co-founder of Agoda.com, had a difficult task ahead of him. Agoda had been acquired by a global online travel giant - the Priceline group in 2007. The terms of the acquisition were based on a three year earn-out period following which Priceline would pay Agoda the bulk of the acquisition pay-out. However, by 2008, Agoda was in dire need to improve its revenue figures, and the Priceline Group's board was pessimistic of Agoda's chances of hitting its earn-out targets. The general assumption was that the Asia based start-up's assets would be gobbled up and integrated into the group as part of its much larger and profitable western brand. Rosenstein, however, believed in the strengths of his company - a venture he had co-founded with Michael Kenny in 2005 in Singapore. Agoda.com was one of the first online travel platforms in Asia to build its business globally and attract travellers from all parts of the world. By the late 2000's however, Agoda had lost its dominance in Asia, with the emergence of global players in the market and rising competition from Chinese online travel agencies (OTA's). Other challenges like technology disruption, a fragmented and diversified Asian market, unstable political environment in Thailand (Agoda's largest office was in Bangkok at the time) and difficulty in attracting the right talent, obstructed its growth path as well. In December 2009, heightened concerns over the future of Agoda prompted Rosenstein to sit with his team and formulate a strategy to enable Agoda to hit its earn-out targets within the stipulated three year period ending in 2010. How could Agoda grow its business and revenue? How could it improve on its marketing strategy, further build its supply and attract more consumers to make bookings on its website? How could Rosenstein make the acquisition work?"</li> <li> The review notes: "Agoda is a hotel booking service owned by Booking Holdings, which also owns Booking.com and Priceline.com. If you’re strictly looking for hotels, this is one of the best services. It has good search features and offers secret deals with heavy discounts. Like most of the booking services, Agoda lets you sort search results to find the lowest price or the most highly rated hotels for your target dates. You can also look at the secret deals that Agoda selects for you. These are highly discounted rates, sometimes as high as 4 percent, at hotels that remain anonymous until you book a stay. If you’re looking for the best deal, this is a good place to start. You can filter your results, so only hotels that fall within a certain price range or have certain amenities are displayed within the results. This is also where you can remove certain types of accommodations, so if you’re not interested in hotels or resorts, you can exclude them from the search. Agoda includes hostels and apartments in its results. If you’re traveling by yourself, a hostel is usually cheaper than a motel if you don’t mind sharing rooms with fellow travelers."</li> <li> The abstract notes: "This study explored key considerations of travelers when using the online booking website, Agoda, and examined whether consumer background affect their perception of online booking site quality, satisfaction and loyalty."</li> <li> The article notes: "Latterly, the web Agoda has been the most popular hotel agency because it stores and presents a scoring, rating and opining of previous travellers. Typically, when a customer needs to choose a hotel, they will find the general published opinions according to the products and service of their interested. For this reason, Agoda conducts to the research and surveys. Agoda is important the growth in economic and social of Thailand, especially by the explosive growth of the generated opinions the web users. Normally, Agoda separates users into two types: travellers and hotels. Firstly, a traveller reviews the efficiency of hotels by reading the opinion of the previous travellers and reserves the chosen hotel via Agoda directly. Secondly, a hotel achieves benefit from score and opinion. Thus, Agoda has no necessary to conduct surveys, to organize focused group, or to employ external consultants in order to find consumer opinions or sentiments about its products and those of its competitors. Consequently, an automatic system which can extract and retrieve the opinion related to their interest might be essential. ... Agoda is an online hotel reservation and booking website that popular in current. The Agoda supports 37 languages that widely used in the world. Moreover, it collects more than 250,000 hotels around the 37,000 cities worldwide to be significant information for customers booking. Agoda website welcome to keep a customer feedback that review affiliated hotels. The Agoda achieves customer opinions when they finish their trip. Generally a customer opinion will accord to Location, Cleanness, Service, Staff performance, Food and Comfort. The hotel scores are calculated from rating of customer that review according to the hotel. The top-rank hotel in 2017 of Agoda website achieved from the summation of the whole customer rating on a particular hotel divided the number of reviews that get the hotel ranking."</li> <li> The article notes: "The rise of the internet over the past two decades has had many impacts on global culture and commerce, with the travel industry one of the first to see the potential in the online world. Among the pioneers in the field has been Asia-based Agoda.com, today one of the world’s fastest-growing online hotel booking platforms. Robert Rosenstein and his friend Michael Kenny cofounded Agoda 15 years ago in Phuket and worked through growth, downturn and acquisition. Mr Rosenstein now leads the Singapore-based company as CEO, overseeing 1,300 employees representing more than 20 countries. ... Beginning life as PlanetHoliday.com, the company signed up its first hotel in Phuket, before expanding to Bangkok, then across Thailand and the region in the following years. In 2005 it became Agoda and set up headquarters in Singapore. ... Even though Asia is the main focus for Agoda, its site now covers all the major capitals around the world that Asian travellers love to visit, among them New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris."</li> <li> The article notes: "In 1997, two men — Michael Kenny and Robert Rosenstein – co-founded a company with a website named PlanetHoliday.com, which aimed to disrupt the hotel booking space. In Phuket, Thailand, they started to work out deals with hotels and charged users directly with their credit cards. In early 2000, the company started experimenting with user experience features like real-time chat with customer service officers, and grew the business with pay-per-click advertising. In 2003, PlanetHoliday added PrecisionReservations.com as a partner and the two merged as Singapore-based Agoda. Later on in 2007, Agoda was then acquired by Priceline. Robert, now the CEO of Agoda, told Tech Cocktail in 2012 that he had started the company with a global site in mind."</li>

<li> The abstract notes: "This study aims to examine the influence of online servicescape against the behavioural intention of Agoda products in Indonesia. The research was verification study, and the method used was explanatory survey. Using a simple random sampling technique, 165 respondents were involved and path analysis was used. The results showed that there was a significant effect of online servicescape on behavioural intention. In an effort to improve the behavioural intention of consumers, it is recommended that companies better understand the factors online servicescape as one of the basis in providing services for users of Agoda websites in Indonesia."</li> <li> The article notes: "In trouble: The Singapore based Agoda.com, one of Asia's leading hotel-booking websites, is fined for more than NT$20 million (US$626,100) for not legally registering as a business in Taiwan and for failing to issue unified invoices. The National Taxation Bureau of Taipei (NTBT) fined Agoda.com, one of Asia's leading hotel-booking websites, for more than NT$20 million (US$626,100) for not legally registering as a business in Taiwan and for failing to issue unified invoices, the NTBT said Thursday."</li> <li> The article notes: "The country's corporate overseer plans to 'order' Agoda to revise its unfair refund policy as it didn't take proper action regarding a previous recommendation. ... While the rest of the three online travel agencies followed the FTC's recommendation, Agoda stirred controversy by refunding customers with mileage points instead of cash. According to a consumer media outlet, a customer was offered 50 percent of the cash back as mileage points despite the cancellation being made four months prior to the flight date. An increasing number of customers have been using global online travel agencies here to reserve hotels abroad, but consumer complaints have been soaring due to unfair policies."</li> <li> The article notes: "Agoda is Priceline's effort to find new sources of growth in Asia as its U.S. and European business mature and face increased competition. ... Now Priceline is sending Agoda employees to pound the pavement in Asia and calling on hoteliers there in an effort to get them to list on the site. Agoda's services are offered in 30 languages and target customers in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Like Priceline's European business, Agoda offers fixed-price listings and takes a cut from each booking. ... The company in 2007 acquired Agoda, a Bangkok and Singapore-based start-up with about 200 employees, in a deal valued at around $158 million. Agoda, which had gross bookings of $36 million in the 10 months before Priceline bought it, had $244 million in bookings last year, or about 3% of Priceline's total business."</li> </ol>

There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow Agoda to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Cunard (talk) 10:22, 3 August 2020 (UTC)</li></ul>


 * Per Editing policy, the article can be improved to address its deficiencies. The article is well-sourced to reliable sources containing information about the company's history and criticism of it. Overly promotional material or material sourced to press releases can be removed. Cunard (talk) 10:22, 3 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete fails WP:NCORP. Graywalls (talk) 19:59, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm not sure if US editors know this but Agoda is quite a well known brand... in Asia-Pacific can we consider an alternative to deletion here. i.e. SMH, my understanding is they are owned by Booking holdings and are just individual properties. But they run ads on primetime TV in Australia for instance.... so its a highly plausible search term, rather than just delete this property whic is more popular in Asia pacific - probably consistency would be needed with their other properties... PainProf (talk) 20:17, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep Per and . Agoda is notable and well-known Online Travel Agency brand in APAC region. – robertsky (talk) 02:16, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

<div class="xfd_relist" style="border-top: 1px solid #AAA; border-bottom: 1px solid #AAA; padding: 0px 25px;"> Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 04:47, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete for failing to pass the notability guidelines of WP:NCORP. The sources provided by Cunard all seem to be trivial and don't establish notability. Which is just proven by the votes and comments below his that ignored the sources and said the article should be kept "because popularity." Which isn't a policy based rational or one based on the topic meeting the COREDEPTH standard. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:23, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
 * <small class="delsort-notice">Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Websites-related deletion discussions. Graywalls (talk) 08:06, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
 * <small class="delsort-notice">Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Asia-related deletion discussions. Graywalls (talk) 08:06, 9 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Weak keep as there are a number of publications on Google Scholar which mention Agoda, but they are mostly about pulling data from the website to analyse the data in there. These are some of the better sources:
 * Darini, Mohammad, and Fatemeh Khozaei. "The study of factors affecting customer’s satisfaction with the three star hotels in Dubai." International Journal of Advanced Engineering, Management and Science 2.2 (2016): 239373.
 * (#3 above)
 * There is a case study here used as educational material which might have citations to reliable sources, but I'm not able to access it. Given the number of publications that cite Agoda as a source of travel data (same as booking.com, hotels.com, etc.), this might be enough to warrant a keep. But it might not be enough to write something substantial about the company/website. Maybe a solution is to stubify the article and remove all the non-encyclopedic material, or rewrite the article from scratch using the publications on Google Scholar, then fill in the missing parts about its history from the press releases. -- AquaDTRS (talk) 06:29, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * (#3 above)
 * There is a case study here used as educational material which might have citations to reliable sources, but I'm not able to access it. Given the number of publications that cite Agoda as a source of travel data (same as booking.com, hotels.com, etc.), this might be enough to warrant a keep. But it might not be enough to write something substantial about the company/website. Maybe a solution is to stubify the article and remove all the non-encyclopedic material, or rewrite the article from scratch using the publications on Google Scholar, then fill in the missing parts about its history from the press releases. -- AquaDTRS (talk) 06:29, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

<div class="xfd_relist" style="border-top: 1px solid #AAA; border-bottom: 1px solid #AAA; padding: 0px 25px;"> Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   11:12, 18 August 2020 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.