Web Watch: Hotel video site lets you look before booking
— -- TVtrip.com
What it offers:Hotel video tours
What we like:TVtrip.com offers video tours — shot by professional videographers — of hotel exteriors, lobbies, guest rooms and more. Listings are accompanied by a minimum room rate for the next month, and are integrated with a search tool that launches a booking window. Hotels also can be viewed on an interactive city map.
What needs work:Inventory is limited, just under 11,000 videos in all, and is skewed toward Europe and Asia. Popular U.S. destinations such as Orlando are not yet included yet. Text with the videos is rife with marketing-speak.
What it offers:Reviews and rankings of 140,000 hotels worldwide
What we like:The aggregation of reader reviews and ratings is the headline here as TravelPost pulls hotel content from more than 200 online sources. Where sites such as Yahoo Travel or IgoUgo have a deep pool of reader hotel reviews, TravelPost aggregates ratings and comments from those and several more, creating a nice Web-wide snapshot of travelers' sentiments.
Just as Kayak.com (TravelPost's parent company, and a USA TODAY business partner) has some of the most user-friendly flight search tools, TravelPost has handy filters on their pages to allow searches by hotel type, chains and star ratings. Similarly, reader reviews can be filtered by age, gender, ranking, site and other parameters. Booking functionality is well integrated with Kayak.com, allowing comparison shopping across several sites.
What needs work:The Web's biggest reader review site, TripAdvisor.com, is not among the sites from which TravelPost aggregates (TravelPost spokeswoman Kellie Pelletier says TripAdvisor declined to be included). For certain properties, we found reader reviews on sites from which Travel Post pulls content that did not appear on the corresponding hotel page on TravelPost. TravelPost says it is importing new content every week and the discrepancy should cease shortly.
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