Google has just launched a new service called Hotel Finder, which should be of great use to travelers. The site is easy to use, simple and could definitely compete with the current top hotel booking sites, which it currently relies on.
Google’s new service allows users to find hotel rooms available in a given area, along with the price and amenities of each hotel in that area.
Hotel Finder selects the most visited areas of major cities by default and shows hotels within these tourist hotspots. Users can also draw a shape on an interactive map around the area they wish to stay in.
The Hotel Finder service provides a comparative study of the price range of hotels in an area.
Details of each hotel in the area are provided when a user clicks on the listing, along with a collage of images and reviews from Google Places. Users can then shortlist the hotels they are interested in or book a room in the hotel they like via Travelocity, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com or the hotel itself.
Hotel Finder is currently in the pre-beta experimental stage and is available only for hotels in various American cities. The interface is very similar to other sites and uses sliding scales and quick option selectors to allow users to narrow their choice. The most popular feature of the service is likely to end up being the seamless integration with Google Maps, which makes selecting hotels in a particular region extremely simple.
