The Hotel World according to Meta Search Engines - (Part 4) - Hotelscombined.com

Score: 8.5 /10

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HotelsCombined.com is a hotel meta search engine with 20 employees with a based office in Sidney, Australia.

It all started late 2005 in Sydney, Australia when a few former HotelClub.com executives were brain storming how to create the ultimate hotel reservation website. The goal was to eliminate the frustrations felt by customers when scouring the internet trying to book a hotel room. When hearing of a local renowned software engineer working on a similar concept they decided to join forces and start creating an initial prototype. The combination of business experience, internet marketing, strong technical skill and 9 months of hard work produced what we now know as HotelsCombined.com

They have three main objectives for 2009:

 

(1) Increase their visitor numbers to 3 million visitors a month (they are currently receiving 1.5-2 million visitors a month)

 

(2) Continue to improve their product to retain the position as the world’s leading hotel meta search engine

 

(3) Strengthening their commercial and social responsibility. Currently they support CarbonFund.org, SustainableTravelInternational.org, World Vision, Make A Wish Foundation and WWF.  

 

Disclaimer: HotelsCombined is one of Hotel Blogs sponsors.

Comments

[Guillaume Thevenot]

Hi Michael,

When I have tried all the meta search engines, I think people are more interested to see how you can filter the results down to your own criteria rather than having a massive amount of hotels in cities like Paris or London. And this is how these search engines differ from one to another.

Guillaume

[Michael Madison]

The site looks like a Kayak's hotel search twin brother - or is Kayak picking up ideas here from a specialist?
In searching for a hotel for Berlin (ITB in March) I found it lists more hotels (752 total of which 445 with price vs. Orbitz 424 total and 282 without price). They are doing something right! (I did not go through all pages to make sure there are no duplicates, but on Kayak I found some inaccuracies).
The UI could be improved slightly, but is already state of the art.
Coming features (I assume...) like map based search and search by area (useful in a place like Berlin) will be useful.
Relying on aggregated data is always tricky, but they are doing a good job in putting things together (notably photos form many sources).
Customer comments / feedback seems to be from their own site. I wonder whether there is any mechanism to verify that the person has actually stayed. Integrating feedback from multiple sources could be useful (if presented properly).

[Jolly Martin]

Excellent website. A good search engine for hotels listing.
Thanks