Hotelicopter, the April Fools' Day joke about a helicopter that doubled as a hotel, turned out to be fake. A week later though, the same company that successfully played the joke on most of the Internet has launched a real product with the same name.
Hotelicopter the travel search engine is not nearly as exciting a concept as a converted Soviet chopper-turned-air hotel, but it does an admirable job at scouring the Web to find you deals on hotel bookings. It searches and aggregates the results from more than 30 different hotel deals sites like Priceline, Hotels.com, and Booking.com, and jumps you straight to each provider's purchase page.
One of its nice features is the option to narrow down the area of a town for which you want it to search for results either through a drop down list of neighborhoods or by drawing a fence within the results map. It will then refresh with results only from that area, right down to a half-block radius. This can be handy if you know the place you're visiting.
Included is the option to log in and link it up with your Facebook account using Facebook Connect, which for now is simply a way to bypass registering with the site, and promote that you're using it on your profile every time you book a trip. What would be far more interesting though, is if it pulled a Dopplr and would let you know a friend who lived in each place where you were planning to travel. That way you could ask if you could couch surf and save some money. Of course, that's not how Hotelicopter makes its money, which is in referrals to all these booking sites and on-page Google ads, but I think it would make for a far more compelling product.
Hotelicopter lets you narrow down the results you want to see by simply drawing a fence around an area of the map. You can also filter by neighborhoods.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
If you're looking to find a place to crash in a foreign city and have tried solutions like Craigslist or AirBed & Breakfast, you've got to check out Roomorama. It's a peer-to-peer rental community that lets visitors find a cheap, low-key place to stay, and gives renters with some extra space a chance to make some cash.
Like AirBed & Breakfast, people with some extra space can put their place up on the market. If someone's coming into town during the dates you set as being available, they'll have the option to book it. Once you approve the booking, the payment goes through Roomorama's system (which uses PayPal) and the traveler gets a confirmation.
As a traveler you can sort out listings by all kinds of factors, but my favorite is the simple matrix of amenities. You can click to highlight the things you want, like Wi-Fi, parking, laundry, and the all important hot tub. It'll filter the results in real time with every click, and if there's not something that matches up with what you're looking for you can opt to make it a request. If someone's been on the fence about listing their place they can then claim your request with their offering. If an agreement is met you can book it on the spot.
Roomorama is currently limited to New York City with other cities to come. In the meantime, you can list and request rooms in different cities using the aforementioned shout-out system that does the matching for you.
[via Delicious]
Related: Rent your house or couch by the day with AirBed & Breakfast
List places for others to stay or find a place to crash yourself with Roomorama, a hotel service of sorts that cuts out the middle man.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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