Hotelicopter has a database of 160,000 hotels (TripAdvisor claims 700,000), and it does achieve the impossible of managing to be different. It has actually been around since 2006, but an acquisition of new capital in April 2011 has seen it rise steadily in popularity with American users recently. You will still have to delve several pages into those Google search results before you find it, and it’s far from being a household name, but its elegant simplicity may yet prove to be a winner in the ever-increasing SmartPhone market.
The company, working out of Charlottesville, Virginia, shows that ‘small is beautiful’, not only in the size of its operation compared to the Big Boys but in its very basic approach to hotel booking. “Where do you want to stay” is the question on its home page. At this stage even dates are optional. Type in “New York” and its 454 NY hotels start to appear in a layout that looks a lot like Pinterest.
The information is scaled down to the minimum, with just a photo, name, star rating and a lowest price. You can toggle between this view and a map view, to check the locations. You can also switch from the Gallery view to the Summary view, where the hotels are instead listed down the page, with a couple of sentences about each one. Click on “View Full Details” and the detailed hotel information is shown in a pop-up window.
It’s a very different approach to the information overload you get with the likes of TripAdvisor, where every single page is a cacophony of stuff competing for your attention – hundreds of user reviews, Google maps, prices, restaurants in the area, things to do, weather reports, adverts, other hotels you looked at recently, hotels your Facebook friends have stayed at, even other hotels that complete strangers who looked at this hotel also happened to look at. ENOUGH ALREADY!!
Hotelicopter hopes its Back to Basics approach will appeal to the SmartPhone generation, and its home page has a blog-like simplicity about it. Across the top are five navigation buttons; Price, Star Rating, Amenities, Brand, and Sort. The first two offer sliding bars, so that as you narrow the price range to between, say $200-$300 a night, all other hotels disappear. Amenities and Brand offer a drop-down box where you can tick your preferences, while Sort allows you to sort the hotels alphabetically, by price or by star rating.
It’s a welcomingly simple approach, and you can feel yourself relaxing as the choices available are narrowed down to something you feel you can cope with. Find the hotel and then Hotelicopter searches for the best available rate, through Priceline, Hotels.com, Booking, Expedia.
Best of all, there’s a sense of fun. Hotelicopter is the site that famously fooled a host of tech and travel news websites with an April Fool’s spoof back in 2009!
What do you look for in a hotel booking website?
Image: iStock/Webphotographeer
Post Revisions:
- 23 May, 2012 @ 21:20 [Current Revision] by Mike Gerrard
- 18 March, 2012 @ 13:17 by John O'Nolan
- 18 March, 2012 @ 13:14 by Alastair McKenzie
- 18 March, 2012 @ 13:13 by Alastair McKenzie
Hotelicopter is like a more visual version of HotelsCombined: In other words, it’s a metasearch site that pulls in offers from various booking sites. And while it’s possible to drill down for “property details,” those property details are just boilerplate data that you’d find on a zillion other sites. That may be fine if you know the city where you’re staying (and, preferably, if you know the hotel), but if you’re a first-time visitor to London or Venice or Cincinnati, choosing a hotel on the basis of price and a boilerplate pitch can be a big mistake.
There’s a reason why top booking sites like Booking.com and Venere.com have user reviews, and why TripAdvisor attracts millions of visitors per month: Most travelers don’t choose hotels on price alone.
As for competing with the huge numbers of booking sites on the Web (most of which are simply “thin affiliate sites”), let’s look at that question from a blogger or other Web publisher’s point of view, (After all, this site is aimed at publishers, not hotel-booking services or online travel agents). The blogger/publisher who provides comprehensive and useful information about a destination can profit through affiliate links to a site like Booking.com or Venere.com (or to Hotelicopter, for that matter).
For example, on our site about Venice, Italy, we have more than 800 pages of practical travel information for Venice, and some of those pages are articles about where to stay if you want to be near the railroad station, if you’re arriving or departing by airplane or cruise ship, etc. Such articles are good for us, because they drive traffic to our affiliate partners, but they’re also good for our readers, who typically know little about Venice’s geography and need help in narrowing their list of possible choices before they even think about price.