Amazon Destinations never made it far; halted 6 months after launch

Amazon Destinations, the Amazon group's hotel reservation service, surprisingly shut down its reservation service effectively on October 13, 2015.

Amazon Destinations was launched in April and the site provided reservation services for hotels, inns and bed-and-breakfast properties in the Northeast, the Pasific Northwest, and Southern California.

The special feature that Amazon Destinations offered which made it different from other travel search engine was to allow consumers to find weekend gateways near where they live. The idea was unique from others, just a shame it only last for six months to operate.

"We have learned a lot and have decided to discontinue Amazon Destinations." the company said in a statement, according to Seattletimes.

Amazon has stopped selling reservations in the Amazon Local App as well, as reported on Techcrunch. However, customers won't have to take any action on the site's closure. The booked reservations will still be valid and will be honored by the hotel.

Amazon had been conducted trials with hotel reservations since 2012, when it started to posting up to 100 hotel deals in US. Despite of the intensivity of competition, the online hotel reservation business is noted by analyst as highly profitable travel market.

After launched on April this year, Amazon Destinations showed many improvements on its destination areas and services.

Only two months after its launched, Amazon Destinations was able to double the number of destinations available for booking on the service. The company noted that after two months of operating, the service was included hundreds of hotels across 35 cities and 6 larger metro regions.

The expansion area of service destination then continued to Southeast Atlanta, Texas Gulf Coast (Houston), and Northern California (San Fransisco) metro region, and also the Northeast Metro region, Los Angeles, New York and Settle regions.

Amazon Destination keep expanding its area that four months after launching it had grown from 17 cities to 35, including a number of popular tourist destinations like Cape Cod, Savannah, Myrtle Beach, Napa, Lake Tahoe, and New Orleans. However, Amazon Destinations does not have any flight travel service for the getaway destinations.

Amazon Destination's website with the previous tagline was:" Hit the road, book local gateways", now had changed to: "Effective October 13, 2015, Amazon Destinations stopped selling hotel reservations".

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder, must have a very good reason for the shut down of this potential website. Went on Public on 1997, Amazon is an e-commerce retailer formed originally to provide consumers with products in two segments, it offers users with merchandise and content purchased for resale from vendors and those offered by third-party sellers. Amazon Destinations was one of Amazon's business expansions.

Amazon Destinations just didn't work out for one reason or another. Despite the closure of one of its business, Amazon group remains going strong.

According to Geekwire, recently the company has been testing the waters with less tradition e-commerce offerings, selling new things like handyman services through Amazon Home Services and local deals through Amazon Local.