A few months back, I visited Amsterdam to attend Google’s Progressive Web App Dev Summit 2016 so I thought I would write about trying to find an accommodation in a city I have never been to.
Before you continue reading, it’s important to know that I understand that technology is not perfect and that I am thankful for everything technology has provided to make traveling easier. This post is about me being pedantic.
Getting started
Just to be clear, these are my requirements:
- conveniently located near the conference venue,
- and reasonably priced.
Knowing nothing of the country, locating my conference venue in Google Maps was my obvious first step. I literally keyed in “hotels near Theater Amsterdam”.
After zooming in to what I thought was a decent range around the conference venue, I got one relevant result (WestCord Art Hotel) with the ability to check the availability and rates for certain dates.
So far these are the information I have at my disposal:
-
Location of the hotel
- +1000 for making it so easy and so useful with the street views, terrains and everything, it was almost as if I was there
-
Real users reviews about the hotel
- +1 for having dates the reviews are posted which are important for relevancy
- +1 for being able to sort by helpfulness, recency or score
- -1 for having to open a new tab (feels like a separate application)
-
Rates by different providers
- +1 for ease of price comparison between some providers
- +1 for indication of deals (Singaporeans are born to love sales!)
- -1 for not rates being accurate once handed over to the actual provider pages (yes I know it’s difficult but this is a nitpick post)
- -1 for not enough information for what type of room and bed these rates are for
And the following (remember, these are my requirements) are missing:
- Check-in and check-out time (just to know what time I can have my beauty nap if anything)
- Bed type (single or double size)
- Common or private bathroom/toilet (I like to take my time on the throne)
- Free cancellation policy (shit happens, better be safe than sorry)
- Photos of the room types (it would be nice to have some idea where I am spending my nights)
- Free Wi-Fi
Honestly, I’m really just grateful that Google even provided these much information to get me started with just an address that I had only heard about a few minutes ago. Thanks Google!
Anyway, knowing that this is probably the most relevant hotel based on my criteria about distance, I am going to use it as the correct answer for an experiment later on.
Experiment
Assuming that I did not start out with Google Maps, I wondered how far I could go directly with websites meant to help me achieve this. So I decided to conduct an experiment with a few usual suspects:
- Booking.com
- Hotels.com
- Expedia.com
- Kayak
- Skyscanner
- Trivago
- Airbnb (honorary comparison as this does not actually search hotels)
It is going to be straightforward. I will simply be someone who knows just the destination of the conference and is looking for accommodation per my requirements stated above. This is a very realistic use case because this was literally me.
Destination types
So with just information of the destination being either the landmark or physical address, I had to see if that would get me anywhere:
- Landmark: using the term “Theater Amsterdam” as the destination and naively using the first result returned in their auto-complete together with the same set of dates.
- Address: using the address provided by Google: “Danzigerkade 5, 1013 AP Amsterdam, Netherlands” (I have no idea how addresses are formatted in Netherlands so I decided to just use whatever Google provides, like any sane person would).
| Landmark | Address | |
|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | No | No |
| Hotel.com | No | Yes |
| Expedia | No | Yes |
| Kayak | No | No |
| Skyscanner | No | Yes |
| Trivago | No | No |
| Airbnb | Yes | Yes |
Removing the sites that did not provide useful results, the list is shortened to just:
- Hotels.com
- Expedia
- Skyscanner
- Airbnb
Map view
Well I am not exactly going to book whatever the results that were given to me without first verifying with a map view.
Here’s the test criteria (the more yes, the better):
- Is destination obvious: important for locating nearby accommodation.
- Able to filter: should be able to filter results and see them updated on the map real-time without having to toggle between list and map views
- Are hotel pins meaningful: whether the pins themselves are just plain icons or convey useful information
- Useful info on pin bubbles: bubbles (after clicking on a pin) should be relatively useful on their own in map view so I don’t have to refer back to the list view
| Hotels.com | Expedia.com | Skyscanner | Airbnb | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Is destination obvious? | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Able to filter? | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Good default zoom level? | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Are hotel pins meaningful? | Very | No | Decent | Very |
| Useful info on pin bubbles? | Very | No | No | Yes |
Some special mentions:
-
Airbnb
- Shows the accommodation pins as the rates
- Pins change colours if you have already opened them
- Shows tags of the accommodation created by users
-
Hotels.com
- Provides legend for different pins and options to show some landmarks or transportation.
List view
And now time to verify if the results themselves are useful. Bare in mind this comparison isn’t about the rates themselves but about how much relevant information are available at first glance.
-
Hotels.com: $245
- +1 rates shown as average per night
- +1 provides the number of rooms available
- -1 no indication of room type per rate
- +1 has real users reviews that have a few sort options
- -1 sometimes the rates don’t include taxes until payment page
-
Expedia.com: $245
- +1 rates shown as average per night
- -1 no indication of room type per rate
- +1 has real users reviews that have a few sort options
-
Skyscanner: $216
- -1 rates shown as total
- +1 provides useful information like indication of room type, breakfast or room only, cancellation policy, etc. per rate
- +1 provides distance to the address I used as the destination, Wi-Fi, parking, etc.
- -1 Summarized reviews, not shown as real users reviews
-
Airbnb:
- +1 rates per night
- -2 rates excludes any taxes, services charges, very misleading
- +1 has real users reviews (and one-click translation to English as well)
Conclusion
Unfortunately this experiment is not conclusive as I am not entirely sure if I got lucky with the results or if they will remain consistent with any other addresses in other countries so I can’t say I will rely solely on any of these websites without using Google first. At least not yet.
Hotels.com is pretty good as well but the hidden taxes until the payment page kinda irks me a little. Personally, although Booking.com failed this very specific test, I usually have much success with it and can’t recommend it enough. For other kind of accommodation,I think it is rather obvious Airbnb is the way to go.