Affordable get-aways for skilled auctioneers!
Ah, it’s almost summer! If you’re anything like me, you’ve been waiting for this, enduring the cold and windy climate of the Dutch fall and winter. Moreover, you’d probably want to spend your free time away from home with some recreational activities, but what to do if you’re low on cash? Well, if you’ve got a good virtual poker face, you can always bid on some nice activities at Vakantieveilingen.nl.
Part of Emesa Nederland BV., Vakantieveilingen has been offering low prices on everything away-from-home related, ranging from days out on the town to entire holidays abroad since 2007. How does it work? Well, for consumers it works by simply starting to bid on the deal that you like best and if your bid is the highest made when the auction closes, you win the activity for that price. Consequently, you have a lot of power over how much you want to pay for certain products, but you also have to be careful to you’re not overbid at the end, when many people try to get the deal for as little as possible. Part of its appeal, are the easy sign-up system, which doesn’t require you to first create a profile until you’ve actually won an auction. For businesses, Vakantieveilingen works because according to the website, there’s traffic of about 6 million visitors a month and businesses who partner up with Vakantieveilingen can create an experiental outlet for prospective new consumers, who get to know the company and what it offers for a nominal fee (Saarijärvi, Kannan & Kuusela, 2013; Eisenmann, Parker & Van Alstyne, 2006).
However, the website does have its critics and there are many disgruntled individuals as a quick google search will point out.
Whatever the exact problem within Vakantieveilingen may be, there are many who complain about winning auctions, but then not being able to book in the period they would have liked going. The only thing Emesa can do about this, is cooperate with it business clients more intensely, so as to avoid problems of this nature. This is not to say that Emesa hasn’t been working towards establishing authority for Vakantieveilingen. In 2012 the company announced that it would involve a notary with every bidding, so that the validity of the auctions would always be warranted by a 3th party (Koray et al, 2013) and it has three consumer seals on its website to guarantee this even more (Vakantieveilingen, een voordeel of niet? 2014).
Despite its flaws, Vakantieveilingen is probably here to stay. Apart from Vakantieveilingen, Emesa exploits two other websites (with similar concepts): InpakkenenWegwezen.nl and ActievandeDag.nl. The company has 100 employees en had a gross profit in excess of 13 million euros in 2010. Additionally, Emesa is rolling-out the concept abroad in Germany, Spain, the UK, Belgium and Italy.
So I would advise you to brush up on your auctioneering skills and head on over to Vakantieveilingen.nl to see what bargains you can scoop up!
References:
- Eisenmann, Thomas, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne. “Strategies for two-sided markets.” Harvard Business Review 84.10 (2006): 92.
- Özpolat, Koray, et al. “Research Note-The Value of Third-Party Assurance Seals in Online
- Retailing: An Empirical Investigation.” Information Systems Research 24.4 (2013): 1100-1111
- Saarijärvi, Hannu, P. K. Kannan, and Hannu Kuusela. “Value co-creation: theoretical approaches & practical implications.” European Business Review 25.1 (2013): 6-19.
- Vakantieveilingen. Accessed May 19th, 2014. http://www.vakantieveilingen.nl/
- Vakantieveilingen, een voordeel of niet? Accessed May 19th, 2014. http://joriskanters.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/vakantieveilingen-een-voordeel-of-niet
Consumer Value Creation 