Social recommendation site Gogobot began offering hotel booking engines from Expedia, Kayak, hotels.com, Orbitz and Priceline.
When consumers look for a hotel and select Check Prices, they can choose to continue their search and book on the websites of these Gogobot partners.
The booking engines open one at a time in separate windows.
Travis Katz, Gogobot's founder and CEO, says users requested a booking service to supplement the trip-planning advice they get from their Facebook friends and the Gogobot community.
Katz says he was surprised to find the variations in hotel pricing among these online travel agency and metasearch providers.
"There are deals to be found and you just have to look for those deals," Katz says.
Gogobot began its soft launch on Nov. 15 and Katz says the hotel booking engine feature is Gogobot's "second revenue stream," following the implementation of a vacation-rental distribution partnership with HomeAway in January 2010.
Google Ventures invested in HomeAway in October 2010, and Google’s Eric Schmidt is among Gogobot’s investors.
Users clicking on the Vacation Rentals tab on Gogobot can select this sort of accommodation if they prefer it over hotels.
"Users are slowly discovering it," Katz says of the vacation rentals option.
Katz says there have been some surprises since the soft launch.
When consumers post questions about trips, in addition to getting answers from social networking friends, local people at the destination and "travel mavens, people who've traveled to everywhere" are chiming in, Katz says.
"We're actually seeing a community of people sharing tips with one another and it's happening organically on the site," Katz says.
Meanwhile, Gogobot is planning some relatively minor tweaks to the site.
It plans to start notifying seeming destination experts -- people who seem to be answering a lot of questions about Hawaii, for instance -- when there is a pertinent question, if they opt-in to the notification service, Katz says.
Other travel question and answer sites do this, as well.
Gogobot also intends to provide badges or some other symbolic form of recognition to site users whose contributions of answers have been noteworthy.