Category Archives: Hotels

Getaway – Find Hotels In South Africa and Beyond

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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 … Continue reading →

The Kiwi Collection – Find Luxury Hotels With Your Phone

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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 … Continue reading →

Ten New Mobile Hotel Sites From Wyndham

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Wyndham Hotels Group, the worlds largest hotelier, has launched ten mobile sites, one for each of Wyndham’s brands that operate in the U.S. I have my doubts about the multiple site strategy. After a hard day on the road I just want to find the nearest available room at a price I can afford.  I could care less whether it’s a Days Inn, Super 8 or Microtel.  I certainly don’t want to visit ten sites.  Instead I would probably use … Continue reading →

Hyatt Hotel’s New Mobile Site

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Hotel booking sites are traditionally the usability black hole of the mobile web. Finding and booking a hotel at the last minute is something every traveler occasionally has to do. The mobile web seems like an ideal way to do this, yet the major booking sites and hotel chains do not seem to have much interest in capturing this enormous opportunity. Most mobile hotel sites appear to be thrown together with no real usability testing or understanding of the unique … Continue reading →

KeyToss – Best Mobile Hotel Search and Booking Site Yet?

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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. … Continue reading →

Hotel.mobi – Not as Promised

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I saw a  press release today on TMC.net touting a new hotel search and booking site; ” 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.” All of which sounds great.  For some reason mobile sites … Continue reading →

Best Western Mobile

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BestWestern.com detects mobile browsers and redirects to a mobile site where you can find and book hotels in the Best Western chain, which operates in the United States, Canada and Australia. Like just about every mobile hotel booking site I’ve every seen, this one has some pretty horrendous usability problems. Things start fairly well with a search form where you enter the city and dates you want to book and then choose the state and country from a drop down. … Continue reading →

Priceline.mobi

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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’ve found 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 … Continue reading →