Wap Review

I've been pretty dissatisfied with most of the mobile hotel search and booking sites I've tried. I don't know what it is about this category but hotel sites always seem to have serious usability problems; unnecessarily complex search forms, illogically sorted results, listings for hotels that turn out to have no availability, "bait and switch" pricing or prices buried several levels deep making comparison shopping unnecessarily complex.

This week Keytoss launched a new mobile hotel booking service at h.keytoss.com. I've covered KeyToss before. It's a personalized mobile homepage similar to iGoogle or NetVibes. I like KeyToss, it's feature rich and enables adding a lot more types of content than the rather limited mobile versions of iGoogle and NetVibes. According to Keytoss their hotel site is "...the Most Advanced Hotel Booking Service on the Mobile Web". That's a bold claim and I approached the site skeptically but with high hopes.

KeyToss is location enabled as much as is possible with current technology. It tries to use geolocation to find you so you don't have to enter your location. Keytoss can geolocate on Android and Windows Mobile phones using Google's Gears, BlackBerry's with the BlackBerry browser's built in location support and on the iPhone with the help of Alocola, a free open source app.

Even without geoloacation it's pretty easy to use KeyToss. The search form has only one required field, your location. If it hasn't been prepopulated by geolocation it will accept your free form entry of a neighborhood, address, landmark, city, airport code, postal code or geo-coordinates. The rest of the search form is prepopulated with logical defaults; one room for tonight, rated at least two stars, under $250, for one person, for one night. All of those can of course be changed.

The results seem to be mostly sorted by price, from lowest to highest. There doesn't appear to be any way to change the sort to distance from your location, which given Keytoss' geolocation ability, would be a great feature for trying to find a room at the last minute in an unfamiliar city.

The listings include only available rooms with the lowest available base price for each hotel shown right in the initial listing along with a link to a map. Clicking on a particular hotel in the list of results will give the bottom line price, including taxes and fees, and considerable detail on each property; amenities, available services and pet and cancellation policies. KeyToss iteself does not have a cancellation charge but individual hotels often do.

Keytoss gets its inventory from Hotels.com and seems to have a huge number of properties available. A search for a room for tonight under $100 (which is considered very cheap) in downtown San Francisco returned 85 results including a $99 deal at a well located four star hotel!

By default, Keytoss lists up to 100 results on a single page. These pages are large, about 200 KB when images are included. That''s fine for the iPhone, Opera Mini or even the BlackBerry, but is obviously too large for most feature phones. To deal with this and make the site work on all phones, Keytoss provides an option to paginate the results, 15 to a page, and another to disable images. Pagination reduces page size to about 40 KB and turning off images drops it to 9 KB. With both options I was able to use KeyToss Hotels on an old RAZR with Motorola's MIB browser and a couple low end Verizon LG phones running Openwave 6.2.3. However the Openwave 7.0 browsers of two Sprint/Nextel iDen Motorola phones claimed that even the 9 KB version of KeyToss was "Too large for available memory". Which is surprising as the same phones could load other pages as large as 30 KB. Which looks like an Openwave bug as Keytoss seems to be doing everything right here.

Booking a room with KeyToss is pretty easy too. If you have set up a profile with KeyToss in advance and included your credit card details you can book with just a click or two after signing in. If you haven't registered there's a click to call option. A discount code in each listing presumably insures that you will get the advertised price even if booking by phone. Finally you can book the old fashioned, non-mobile friendly way by filling out a typical 13 field form with name, address, phone number, card number, expiration date, security code, etc..

All in all, I think KeyToss lives up to it's claim as being the most advanced mobile hotel booking site. It's not perfect, I'd like to see it make better use of geolocation to identify the nearest hotels with vacancies and also use browser detection and adaptation to automatically deliver compatible results to all browsers. But the combination of a large inventory, ease of use and a format that encourages comparison shopping put it well ahead of the current competition.

Lodging.mobi is the latest in a number of new mobile hotel search and reservation sites to launch this year. Nice to see this long neglected area of the mobile web finally getting some attention. The well designed site has an inventory of over 75,000 hotels around the world.  It uses browser detection and adaptation to deliver page and images sizes optimized for six different classes of device and should be usable on virtually any phone.

Lodging.mobi has 

The user interface is straight forward with the search form leading directly to a list of available rooms sorted by price from lowest to highest. Prices listed are room rates only, taxes and fees are not included.

Making a reservation requires a credit card and filling out a long form. In this initial release it doesn't appear to be possible to store your credit card details for future use or complete a reservation over the phone. Source: Mobility.mobi

A while back I posted about hotel search and booking sites and why I think they are a natural for WAP.
It seems that Hotels.com agrees as they have launched a WAP site which comes in both WAP1 (wml) and WAP2 (xhtml) versions.
The UI is well optimized for mobile devices in some areas but breaks down badly in several critical areas. As you can see in the first image, numeric accelerators are used and there are a number of ways to search, both of which are good things. Search By City/State lets you drill down by first letter of state, first letter of city which works well except if you are looking for a city starting with 'S' in California which has so many cities starting with "San". There is also a Spell City option which should work well in the case of "San Lius Obisbo", for example. Sadly , there is a problem with Spell City , you type the first few letters of the city name and it immediately takes you to the page where you choose dates, number of rooms, etc. without confirming the city selected or offering you a selection if your search string was not unique. So if I type "San" it gives me hotels in San Francisco, if I type "San L" it gives me rooms in San Luis Obisbo, but suppose I was looking for San Leandro, I'd have to back up several screens and enter "San Le"! This is not good UI design, in the case of something with an unknown result like a substring search, the user needs to know the result before rather than after additional wasted input.
Another issue is that when you get a list of hotels meeting your seaarch criteria, the default listing is in some sort of undefined order with budget and luxury properties and sites in the city center as well as much as 30 miles away intermingled. If you scroll to the bottom of the list you can sort by price, proximity to well know tourist venues, rating, alpha and distance. An improvement would be to put the sort selection at the top of the page and to default the sort to something reasonable like price or distance. Sorting by distance lets you enter a base address to calculate the distance from. Thoughtfully, default values of the city and state that you originally searched for are pre-entered so all you have to do is hit the Submit button at the bottom of the page.
Once you choose a hotel, you are presented with a page with address, description, price of the cheapest room and for some hotels, a picture. Also on this page are links to pages offering a more detailed description, more pictures, directions to the hotel, check-in and check-out times and a list of hotel amenities. It is not possible to book a hotel online and you are not given the hotel's own phone number. To book you must call Hotels.com.
The WAP1 version of the site is almost identical to the WAP2 version. The only differences are that the WAP1 version has no hotel photos and that it lists hotel prices with each entry on the list of hotels rather than forcing you to select each hotel to find it's rate. The WAP1 version also has several bugs. You are forced you to scroll horizontally to read the hotel's full name and price in the list of hotels, this only works well for Openwave browsers which continually scroll the selected item marquee style. On many Nokia browsers the text is simply cut off with no way to scroll sideways. Other bugs are that all the sort options actually sort by price and search by city name doesn't seem to work. Even worse, if search fails you don't get an error message until you have entered your dates and number of rooms and guests - that is inexcusable and the sort of thing that will discourage users from trying to use the site (or WAP) ever again.

Hotel.mobi continues the tradition of mobile hotel search sites being useless and/or unusable. The company behind the site issued promissing sounding a press release:

"Hotel.mobi, a portal run by Quinv SA, a Luxembourg-based company that invests in domain names and high value web portals, has announced the official launch of its website, http://www.hotel.mobi a web directory enabling mobile users to find the hotels near their current location and call the hotels' booking desks in one single click." 

I had high hopes for hotel.mobi. When I visited the site with a PC browser i saw a non-mobile page promoting the mobile version: "Find hotels instantly in the city you are in then simply click to call to make a reservation." The promotional page goes on to say that the mobile site features "Geo Loacalisation", "The best and most recent prices" and Google maps.

All of which makes it sound like Hotels.mobi is the answer to travelers' prayers, finally an easy to use mobile site that actually lets you quickly find and book the best hotels deals using only your mobile browser.

So I went to hotel.mobi with my N95 and typed in "San Francisco".  I got a 115 results, basically just a  list of hotel names in alphabetical order; no prices, no address, no phone number and no indication if these hotels had any availability.  That's not a good start, to be useful for price comparison, prices need to be included in initial results and there needs to be a way to filter or sort by price.  You also don't want to see listings for hotels that are full and you need to have some indication of how far away each property is.

Not giving up, I clicked on several of the hotels to see if the promised features were buried a bit deeper.  When I clicked a hotel name I got a page with just the hotel's address and a "Display Details" link that led to yet another page  with  a description of the property and it's amenities. But there was no map, no prices and no click to call phone number, in fact no phone number at all, although a few hotels did list an mailto: email address or a fax number. I tried using Opera Mini and got the same results as with the built-in browser.

What a huge disconnect between what's promised and what's actually delivered.  I'm hoping that the advanced mobile site described in the press release and on the PC web site is just not quite finished yet and what I'm seeing is an old or placeholder version. I'll be watching hotel.mobi for the next few days and will update this post if the situation improves. For now at least, Hotel.mobi continues the tradition of mobile hotel search sites being mostly useless.

Even if hotel.mobi does eventually turn in to something great, sending out press releases and doing promotions on the web for something that isn't actually available seems like a bad idea. I'm sure few if any mobile visitors to hotel.mobi in it's current sorry state will ever return. Source: TMC.net via Mobility.Mobi

Search and book rooms at hotels in 15,000 destinations worldwide. Many user hotel reviews.  Booking is by credit card.  Large pages and a dependence on JavaScript for some functions will break this site on most feature phones.  Some usability isssues including broken links on the FAQ page and phone numers that are not click to call. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Orbitz hotel search is rather limited, you pick one of 20 major US cities and get a list of five hotels (with room prices) in each city that have availability for tonight. To actually book a hotel you have to call Orbitz - at least it's a click to call link.

I like using Priceline.com for booking hotels. It's an "opaque" auction site where you bid for a room by minimum star rating, city and district. You don't find out the name of the hotel until you submit a wining bid. I gotten some great deals over the years using Priceline, the LA Omni for $50/night and both the Hyatt Regency and Marriott Pinnacle in Vancouver, BC for $60/night. Of course you don't usually get such a good price, but I find I can be consistently get a room for 20% less than the best online price. Priceline also has bidding for flights and car rentals although I never much luck with either of those. But for hotels it's hard to beat. There are a lot of tricks to getting the best price from Priceline. I highly recommend that you study the information on BiddingForTravel, a message board for Priceline users, before you place your first bid.

Priceline has taken a rather tentative step into the mobile web at priceline.mobi. Strangely, it's missing what Priceline is best known for - bidding for heavily discounted flights, car rentals and lodging. There are links to Zagat and a few airline mobile flight status pages, but the only thing you can do on Priceline Mobile is search for available hotel rooms. You enter a destination city or airport code and the dates you wish to book and receive a list of available properties with prices and star ratings. To book a room you have call Priceline using a click to call link. The prices don't seem to be special, being similar to other travel sites like Travelocity. The mobile site isn't very robust either, searches frequently return an error saying "Sorry. Your browser didn't understand where you were trying to go". Retrying usually works though.

Expedia's hotel search finds room availability for any date by city or airport code. The legacy WML site is nicely optimized for easy data entry but no prices are given and phone numbers aren't click to call.

Find and book hotels and resorts. primarily in Spain with this well designed and usable site. Listings include description, list of amenities photos, street and email address. maps and direct to hotel click to call phone numbers.

This Kiwi Collection has nothing to do with New Zealand.  It's a Vancouver based online guide to guide to luxury hotels around the world.  Room rates at listed establishments run from a few hundred to several thousand dollars a night.  I'm more of a budget travel myself but some of these places do look very nice indeed.

The mobile web version of the Kiwi Collection offers searchable listings which include descriptions, reviews, photos, click to call phone numbers and a list of awards and recognitions received by each hotel. An advanced search form lets you filter results by interest (honeymoon, adventure, golf, etc.), setting (beach, mountain, city...), style (historical, "camp", western...) and property type (castle, chateau, ranch, etc.).  Unfortunately, my search for a campy, mountain, golf castle did not return any results.

The Kiwi Collection's desktop site lets you check availability and book online using a credit card.  The mobile site's booking options are limited to a form for emailing a reservation request or inquiry to the hotels you are interested in. I can see forgoing online booking on the mobile site but it would be nice to be able to check availability before contacting a hotel. Source: mobility.mobi

Find Hotels around the world. Seems to be limited to major cities. It didn't find anything in Green Bay, WI, USA or Dinan, France for example but did for Milwaukee and Strasbourg. The user interface is clunky. You must key in, typically with T9 or triple-tap both the city and the country. Listings are returned as a long list of hotel name, address and phone number in alphabetical order. Phone numbers are not clickable, you have to remember them and key them in.

Hotel search and booking service. Many listings for Western Europe and China but relatively few for the US and Japan. Nice menu driven UI. Results sortable by price star rating or "distance to central station". The site is German but has the option for English listings (some German words creep into the English pages but English-only readers should be able to understand.) You can request a booking, the hotel will call you back on your mobile if a room is available.

Getaway is a new hotel search engine, primarily for South Africa but with some listings for other African countries and for India. 

Listings include a photo, description and the hotel's phone number and email. While the listings are useful, it might be hard to actually find or even contact the hotels as they  don't include a street address and the phone numbers and email addresses are plain text rather than click-to-call or mailto: links.

It's such a simple thing for web designers to make a phone number and email clickable.  No fancy back-end scripting is required, just a link:

<a href="tel:1-800-555-1212">1-800-555-1212</a>
<a href="mailto:nobody@example.com">nobody@example.com</a>

Granted, "tel:" and :mailto: are not supported by all phones and there is an alternate click to call format that some older phones require . But tel:or mailto: do work on most modern handsets and including them shouldn't break anything on the ones that don't. Making the phone number or email address clickable improves usability immensely and creates a simple but effective call to action that will help drive  business to the target. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory