Hotels.com Repeat? Roomvalues.com becomes Getaroom.com

Dave Litman and Bob Diener, expired non-competes in hand, have been toying around for a few months with a new site - the somewhat awkwardly named roomvalues.com. For those of you who have only known Hotels.com as a part of Expedia (or IAC), Dave and Bob were the original founders of Hotels.com.

Last week, according to DN Journal (a website which tracks the buying and selling of domains) www.getaroom.com was sold at sedo.com for $30,000.

Just as rapidly, roomvalues.com has been re-branded getaroom.com.

Given current softness in the hotel market (with no improvement in sight) and the huge upswing in consumer "deal searching" the timing could not be better for a major launch.

As an added twist, roomvalues.com is pushing consumers to call their call center for even lower prices than those listed on their website. Talk about full circle from the days when websites buried their 800 numbers in an effort to drive to web.

Comically, "Get a Room" was lodging.com's tag line. (Lodging.com was purchased by Cendant and has now been folded into Orbitz....)