Another day, another new Google feature! Google actually came out with Hotel Finder in July, but its only recently getting notoriety because of a few new features they’ve added to it. Using Google’s Hotel Finder, you can now find and filter out hotels based on travel time to landmarks you want to be near by. So if you are going to London and want to make sure you’re near Buckingham Palace, Google’s Hotel Finder will help you find the best options within a 5 minute taxi ride, if thats what you’re looking for.
You can also filter the hotels by “city center”. The closer or the further away you want to be from the certain of Rome, Hotel Finder will help you find exactly what you’re looking for down to the minute of how far you want to be. The difference with this feature than other search engines “maps”, is that it will let you find a specific point on Google Maps, and will find the hotels surrounding that. So if you’re going to New York City and have a friend who lives in an apartment in Union Square, you can pin point on the map exactly where she lives, and it will then provide you with the best hotel options right there.
The first thing you choose when you’re on Google’s Hotel Finder are the dates of your stay, then you choose a price range, and finally you choose the Hotel Class & User Rating. I decided to check out hotels by Scottrade Center in St Louis, where the Blues play. You’ll notice underneath the price it tells you how that price compares to the normal prices – I love this feature! If you don’t like the hotels that are coming up, you can go in an edit your preferences, as well as the map location so it pulls from different areas of the city. I looked at the Sheraton St. Louis, which shows you on the map how close it is to Scottrade Center. It shows you photos, as well as a few reviews.
I personally love that Google is transitioning to an “everything you need” sort of site. You can look for and buy flights right in the search engine, and now you can do the same with hotels. The hotel finder does things that even websites built specially for finding hotels don’t do. You’ll never have to leave the site! Google is starting to become a giant in every industry it enters.
