Welcome to Something for Nothing

I’m currently working on the itinerary for my trip to Italy with my wife. Well, we are looking for Hotels and that is not an easy job. In fact, it’s kind of a pain in the butt. It’s not really hard to find a hotel, but it is hard to find discount hotel reservations.

I was pretty impressed with the cool Google Mashup that Hotel Magician has made of hotel maps. You can go to their site and search for hotels by location. I love this kind of web display. It really puts some perspective to the list of hotels.

Besides being able to search by address and find hotels near that address, Hotel Magician has another great feature that allows you to also look by Hotel chain. This is really important for me since I prefer to stay at Marriott Hotels and so I’d like to see where the closest one is to my desired location.

I guess I should also confess that I love Google Mashups. I love that you can put all this great data that is found in databases across the internet and put them on a very easy to navigate map. I wonder if they are using the enterprise version or if they are capitalizing on the free API for Google Maps. I only wonder, because I’m currently working on a project that uses Google Maps. I haven’t had much time to work on it, but I think it’s a pretty cool idea that could be very popular. We’ll see how it goes.

I only have two major complaints with Hotel Magicians maps. Their icon for a hotel is ugly and needs to be replaced with a good image. In the end, it doesn’t matter too much, but I’d rather have Google’s default image than that horrid looking hotel icon. Also, I don’t like how slow the mouseover events work on the map. They are too slow to respond and don’t always work.

All in all, I must admit that these complaints are pretty minor. Plus, the great news is that my first quick search for Italy showed about a zillion hotels. I guess now I just have to decide which hotel will get my business.

This post sponsored by Hotel Magician