The boring text-based sameness of online hotel booking interfaces is challenged by a new breed of map-based reservation engines.
We recently blogged about an interesting tool for choosing your hotel called HotelMap – an intuitive, visual London Hotel Map web application which has also just had an interesting write-up over at Tnooz.com.
The writer of that article agrees with me that the website's map-based interface may potentially represent the future of hotel booking engines.
It is powered by the time-tested LondonTown (est. 15 years ago) booking engine which links directly to each London hotel's reservation system to guarantee the hotel's best rate in real time. This direct hotel link is a key difference versus the other major online booking companies.
But the coolest part of the London Hotel Map for me is that it mirrors the average individual's thought process by giving you a range of hotel alternatives within close proximity of each other.
Think about it for a moment. In essence, the two prime concerns when most people book a hotel are usually price and (exact) location.
And while HotelMap's interactive deal pricing (linked to the hotel's live availability) takes care of one aspect of this critical twosome, the idea of location can be pretty complex for most people to figure out:
- Is the hotel near a tube station or good public transport connections?
- Is it near my event/party/dinner/convention/meeting?
- Will I have easy access on foot to shops/bars/restaurants, etc.?
- Is the neighborhood safe?
- Is it close to the attractions I want to enjoy?
The above are just a few of many factors in the location equation.
Unlike most other hotel booking websites, HotelMap drives the entire process through a visual representation of your chosen hotel's location - allowing for intuitive "live" price comparison between different options in your preferred area
It's why Sir Rocco Forte – Chairman of Rocco Forte Hotels – once told me that location was the aspect he obsessed about most when looking to bring a new hotel into his fast-expanding hotel collection.
And the effort all of us invest as hotel consumers in figuring out our ideal location is why – once we've chosen a particular hotel – the idea of starting the booking process again from scratch drives us crazy. But that's exactly what we're forced to do by conventional hotel booking websites if we find that our original hotel choice is full, too expensive or not to our taste.
That's also where one of the coolest features of HotelMap kicks in: the ability to immediately check similar hotels (and live pricing) visually in the same area of our initial search. This is both simple and revolutionary.
Clicking the following examples will give you an idea of what I mean:
- Search for hotels near City Inn Westminster
- Search for hotels near the Waldorf Hilton
- Search for hotels near the Jumeirah Carlton Tower
Any of the above 3 links brings you a hotel map which has been created around the area of the hotel specified, but with all the nearby "satellite / alternative hotels" (with live prices for you to compare) also shown.
Booking a hotel online is finally visual and intuitive thanks to a tool which makes the two factors of "price" and "location" the centrepiece of any hotel search
As you'll see by logging in to test the tool, you can immediately home in on your 2nd/3rd choice London hotels in a given area (a locality which you've presumably already identified as your ideal) without having to "start again".
And you also don't have to deal with the niggling doubt of whether cheaper hotels shown in a conventional (non map-based) booking site have an inferior location – since all your options are handily on the same HotelMap.
This is the fundamental reason why I feel that map-driven hotel booking engines like HotelMap are the future of online hotel booking: they allow location to completely drive your hotel search in a visually-intuitive manner.
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Photo credits: HotelMap.com (LondonTown.com)
www.londonhotelsinsight.com 
