I love hipmunk for flights, but I'm less in love with the UI for hotels. I find it more confusing, and less easy to see what's good value. So if that's where they're really making their money then maybe they need to adapt it a bit.
I can see how in some cases it'd be great. If I'm looking for a hotel convenient to, say, the Denver Convention Center, then I can zoom in on that area and pick my favourite out of the small number of hotels within walking distance.
But if my goal is "I want a room somewhere in San Francisco, I don't especially care where as long as it's reasonably convenient, but it has to be reasonably good value but not too cheap" then I just get overwhelmed by having too many options and no obvious way to narrow them down (except by geography, which in this case I don't care too much about). And while I can easily understand "agony" as a function of price and duration, precisely what "ecstasy" should mean is beyond me.
Oh, and it seems to only tell me the average yelp rating, rather than the actual star class of the hotel, so it's really hard for me to decide whether $169 for the "Hotel Abri", with four yelp stars, is better or worse value than $106 a night for the "Hayes Valley Inn", also with four yelp stars. And then the Four Seasons, for $501 a night, gets 4.3 stars, but does that mean it's only slightly better than the Hayes Valley Inn? Probably not. Yelp stars generally aren't that useful except for identifying really awful places, since everywhere seems to rate somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5.
What I'd really like to see is information on how the price being asked for this hotel right now compares to the average price at which it's usually sold.
I can see how in some cases it'd be great. If I'm looking for a hotel convenient to, say, the Denver Convention Center, then I can zoom in on that area and pick my favourite out of the small number of hotels within walking distance.
But if my goal is "I want a room somewhere in San Francisco, I don't especially care where as long as it's reasonably convenient, but it has to be reasonably good value but not too cheap" then I just get overwhelmed by having too many options and no obvious way to narrow them down (except by geography, which in this case I don't care too much about). And while I can easily understand "agony" as a function of price and duration, precisely what "ecstasy" should mean is beyond me.
Oh, and it seems to only tell me the average yelp rating, rather than the actual star class of the hotel, so it's really hard for me to decide whether $169 for the "Hotel Abri", with four yelp stars, is better or worse value than $106 a night for the "Hayes Valley Inn", also with four yelp stars. And then the Four Seasons, for $501 a night, gets 4.3 stars, but does that mean it's only slightly better than the Hayes Valley Inn? Probably not. Yelp stars generally aren't that useful except for identifying really awful places, since everywhere seems to rate somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5.
What I'd really like to see is information on how the price being asked for this hotel right now compares to the average price at which it's usually sold.