An Introduction to Booking Advisor

The following is a sponsored post.

The hospitality business is a competitive one, and as more and more websites come on line to help you find your next hotel room, it is not getting any easier to track down the cheapest rates.

Enter BookingAdvisor.com, a free and independent search engine that scours over 30 other hotel booking sites (such as Expedia, Hotels.com and Hilton) to help you find the best deal. It is organized like most others–with an easy-to-use format, simple instructions, and details to narrow down the perfect bed and breakfast–aside from its unique features, of course.

After typing in your destination, dates, and number of travelers, the humorous phrase “Cooking your search results, a few seconds till dinner time,” is enough to scrape the edge off of any stressed out hotel-booker. Results can be sorted by price, distance from the city used in the search criteria, user ratings, and name.

Further into the process, a small indicator lists each hotel's distance from the city's center, while the listing of top rates amongst at least four sites ensures that the user is making a more than informed decision.  When the user is ready to reserve a hotel room, he or she is referred to the booking website for the transaction.

Other, seemingly positive attributes, left something to be desired.

First and foremost, it's creators at Online Travel Media Ltd. in Bulgaria boast that it is powered by the most advanced Search API tools (provided by Hotelscombined.com, a global accommodation search engine) in order to make finding the best price among multiple hotel reservation websites easier.  Results were varied in my trial searches when I occasionally found better prices elsewhere.

The second, their search feature, is based on a fantastic idea: exploring your options before you have a set-in-stone plan… yet their implementation leaves room for improvement. Searching by hotel is not helpful in most cases, specifying the city or country thereafter may be more so, but even still I wonder. The only occasion I can think of is when the user has a timeshare with a hotel company, but even then the reservations must often be made through the hotel's provider.

Finally, I was and am most intrigued by their blog. On the one hand, a blog is a perfectly noble way to put a face to the brand, to communicate more directly and effectively with the customer, and to provide another outlet of information. The content itself weighs heavily toward destination profiles.  While this can help give visitors trip ideas, a more practical approach of offering expert tips and friendly peer suggestions would be a welcome addition.

BookingAdvisor.com is easy to use, and can potentially save you time if you like to shop around for cheap hotel rates.  While I'd like to say that this hotel booking advisor is a shining star amongst the rest, I'm afraid it's not quite there yet.

Last Updated on March 11th, 2010