Posted on Wednesday, 30th July 2008 by Launching Today
Name
What do they do?
HotelMapSearch.com is a mashup of hotel prices, locations and other basic travel information over Google Maps. This basically means you can search New York City, and you see a map of the area with the hotels marked by average price. This allows you to very easily identify the cheapest hotels that are close to where you want do be. You can also mark attractions, airports and other services on the map to easily find out where you should be staying.
What are they like?
HotelMapSearch.com competes with the general travel websites like Expedia, Travelocity and even community websites like Tripadvisor.
What else should they do?
They are a very simple utility which is focused one one thing so they shouldn’t really be doing much else to clutter the service up. They are doing their thing very, very well. The site is a little slow at the moment, however that could just be the launch killing the server as it’s not the maps that are slow, it’s the other data loading.
How they can fail
HotelMapSearch.com need to ensure their database of hotel prices are up to date, and they should be displaying current average prices, rather than overall average prices. I am not a fan of using a Wikipedia iframe to show information about an attraction, but this area isn’t their true focus so spending a lot of time and resources adding this information could be better spent in other areas. They should also work on getting the process of finding the hotel and booking it as simple as possible.
Final word
I love it. I will absolutely be using this website next time I go away. This is exactly what I wanted to see when I was overseas, but wasn’t aware of anything like this. Tripadvisor should snap this company up quickly and integrate their Hotel ratings into it.
Tags: google maps, hotelmapsearch, mashup, travel
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)
August 1st, 2008 at 5:30 am
“They are a very simple utility which is focused one one thing so they shouldn’t really be doing much else to clutter the service up. They are doing their thing very, very well.”
- thanks for the great review and the reminder to stay focused on the interface and process. We always welcome feedback to help us prioritize our next projects.
Thanks again!