I recently met with Valyn Perini, executive director of the OpenTravel Alliance and a Tnooz node, and the conversation turned to hotel distribution.
We covered some of the usual issues such as the limitations of working with older systems…and of course the ability of the OpenTravel XML messaging schema to help hotels more effectively merchandise their rooms and other services on property.
But we also started to talk about how people are searching for where they want to stay when they travel.
Many travelers bemoan the way many online travel sites and the hotel sites allow you to search for different properties and the way that the information is presented back to you.
The number of parameters you can key in on are very limited.
The same room type can be returned by the search in various configurations and it can be difficult to digest the differences between room types too.
And that’s just within a single property!
Trying to compare choices across different properties and different brands is nigh impossible today.
So how can hotel search get better? Has it even changed significantly in the past decade?
Well, Google has come up with a new way to search for hotels and I don’t think the hotels are probably very happy with it.
Yes, the search giant's location-based search results are very good for showing choices based on proximity to a given location… but the only parameter that it provides is price.
It does level the playing field so that smaller hotels and inns can get placement alongside a Four Seasons or a InterContinental, but it’s hardly the way that people would compare different properties.
Nor do the hotels want to compete on price alone.
The W Ft. Lauderdale that my brother-in-law works at sells “cool” as much as anything (the Extreme WOW suite is outrageous) and it’s not the kind of place that my parents would probably want to stay at.
And it’s not otherwise comparable to a Comfort Inn other than that they both have beds. A completely different experience, at a different price, for a different demographic.
So again let me ask: “How can hotel search get better?”
I recently ran across another great TED Talk by Gary Flake, a technical fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Microsoft Live Labs demonstrating a visual representation of Pivot tables, long the treasure of data geeks, err, business intelligence professionals.
Take a look at the video below and you can begin to imagine how you might use this technology to browse through thousands of hotels, visualizing your search and drilling down through a variety of parameters until you find what you’re looking for.
It’s only a hair over six minutes and well worth the time.
As an aside, this is the second amazing TED Talk from Microsoft Live Labs, following the landmark demo of Photosynth in May 2007.
Why is it that they can create these amazing technologies in the labs, but what they ship to us is so bad? I’m confounded.
It’s true that it would require a standard taxonomy of how to represent different room attributes and property features.
Which leads me back to my lunch-partner Perini. I think the combination of the descriptive nature of XML, and the standardization through Open Travel could make this happen.
What do you think? Would this be a game changer?