It was only a question of time before a travel search service started allowing users to find accommodation based on a property's proximity to Pokémon Go activity.
The mobile gaming app's extraordinary rise into the tech vernacular has led to a number of forecasts as to how it might be used to attract travellers to a service (hotel, airport, restaurant, etc) or, even more likely, to attractions in a destination.
The Niantic-run application lets players capture, battle and train virtual "Pokémons" that materialise in the real world of a user's mobile smartphone.
Simple as that.
A recent report suggested one in ten hotels in the US are already figuring how to lure people in based on their desire to track down the figures in the game.
So, eager to capture the (temporary?) mood of a Pokémon -playing world, accommodation metasearch engine AllTheRooms has created a specific channel and filter so that users can discover what figures are either located or nearby to a property.
The "Poke View" of search results (with accompanying picture of the relevant figures from the game) is now listed alongside the usual list and map views.
AllTheRooms founder Bill Beckler says the company, which aggregates accommodation from numerous sources and includes hotels, rentals and other properties, used the same kind of technology on the Pokémon initiative as it did to build the core accommodation service, essentially by combining and deduplicating data from several sources.
He adds:
"The datasets include crowdsourced data collected by us and by other sites, and data that was gathered directly from the Niantic API that the app uses."
The so-called "Pokestops" and "Gyms" do not move location, he says, so there is a reasonable level of confidence that the data associated with a property will remain in place.
"Our goal is to help people know where to stay based on which Pokémon are likely to be in a given area, and there are patterns of Pokémon spawning, so that means if a particular Pokémon was somewhere in the past, then another will likely be nearby in the future."
AllTheRooms currently features search results from 7.4 million accommodation types around the world.