Searching for Hotels the Easy way
By Darren Cronian on Monday, October 9th, 2006

Searching for hotels can be time consuming, but what could be worse than booking a hotel, and arriving to find that it’s in the middle of a building site, or your hotel room is above a night club. One of the advantages of using the internet to book your hotel is that you can read reviews and research the hotel before booking.

Searching for Hotels the Easy way

Over the weekend I started to look for a hotel for the World Travel Market, at Excel in the London Docklands, and I used a number of websites that I thought I would share to help you book your next hotel on the internet.

The site I always visit first when booking hotels is Active Hotels – usually I know where I want to stay, but I found the site had very limited searching facilities, i.e. I couldn’t search by price or hotels with internet access, but I loved that you could read the reviews of the hotel.

Next I visited Travel Supermarket, which found me a large selection of hotels, from a wide range of travel companies – I loved that I could also include the flight within the search, which I would of found very useful if searching for a hotel abroad.

My favourite site was SideStep.com, why? The search is much more advanced than the other sites and the Smart Sort helps you narrow down the best hotels, by allowing you to filter the hotels out that your not interested in - what I also loved about SideStep is that you could use the map to view the hotels location, you could then view the nearest hotels to your destination.

A new website that I stumbled upon on my travels, was FindThatHotel.co.uk - which apparently features 15,000 UK hotels that can be searched for by city or hotel name. You can rate hotels, recommend hotels and even write reviews.

Both Travel Supermarket and SideStep don’t allow visitors to add reviews of the hotels, but there are a number of websites on the internet that will allow you to do this – just type in the name of the hotel in sites like Trip Advisor and read the reviews left by previous visitors to the hotel.


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6 responses to “Searching for Hotels the Easy way”

melissa | 10 October, 2006 at 2:15 pm

Depending on what kind of hotel you are looking for, take a look at http://www.travelintelligence.net - good selection of boutiquey places as well as small farmhouse hotels and such. Bit clunky to use, but they’ve just launched a neat new mapping feature - displays their hotels on google earth, but also lets users log in and post their own markers on the map. Looks like its not launched proerly yet as they have few posters, but very neat idea. http://www.travelintelligence.net/wsd/html/mymap.php

Kevin May | 10 October, 2006 at 4:51 pm

yes, travelintelligence.net is a very good site - created by Times columnist AA Gill and others, who wanted to provide a portfolio of hotels that consumer travel writers would recommend and write about. the style of hotel is quite “lifestyle” and trendy, but the quality of the reviews is excellent.

not sure how much of an impact TripAdvisor has had on it…

mikeyboy | 10 October, 2006 at 6:48 pm

Melissa, the TI site is an interesting biz model as the reviews are written by well known travel writers but site design is a bit old skool.

Darren, you’re better off flicking through the Yellow pages and getting on the old dog and bone.

Lee Harrison | 10 October, 2006 at 9:27 pm

1 Minute Phone Call to your respected Independent Travel Agent should do the
trick.:-)

Voodooraay | 11 October, 2006 at 2:32 pm

Active Hotels is good. But no ‘candid camera’ function dates it a bit

Paul Johnson | 11 October, 2006 at 11:10 pm

Hi Darren

Don’t forget http://www.ukhotel.com ….! ;)

It uses content from Active, Superbreak, Late Rooms and others, but also has its own, unique content.

There’s also one or two handy features:

1. sorting by star rating: http://www.ukhotel.com/london/docklands-hotels.html

2. the maps: go to http://www.ukhotel.com/london/map/sunborn-yacht-hotel-docklands-sb282.htm and you can see the location of the nearest hotel to ExCel that we have, as well other hotels, B&Bs, tourist attractions, railway stations, etc. nearby.

Paul

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