We just updated the booking process on See Your Hotel. Next time you’ll need to reserve a room you’ll see. It is now all on one secured page, all the information you have to provide and all the hotel information for your stay. Let us know what you think of it and if you experience any problem, tell us so we can make sure this new booking process is the best it can be.
See Your Hotel’s Blog Now Featured on Alltop
2009-08-10Sites to Help Choose A Hotel Location
2009-08-03We have just completed the site www.hotel-times-square.com. This is a site where we try to simply lay out the advantages and inconvenient of the different hotel locations around Times Square in New York. It’s a start and we would really like to have your suggestion to enhance the site. Also if you know of other location where it would be helpful to present a comparison of where the stay this could be the beginning of a lot of small helpful websites.
Visit our hotel guide on where to stay when visiting Times Square in New York City, and tell us how to improve it.
See Your Hotel Is Now Green
2009-07-16That’s right, you may have noticed the logo on the site. Click it, it will bring you to this page. So we join the long list of certified green sites (like Harvard University, Segway, Reddit, …) from CO2stats.
Twitter Reviews: Too Short or Really Timely?
2009-05-15Twitter is all over the place and we decided it was time to add it even in the hotel information. Instead of rolling out our reviews and push the one from Trip Advisor we thought it would be great if people used Twitter to post reviews. On Twitter the way to tag a tweet is to insert a hash tag, so for reviews it could be simply #review and the name of the hotel. We fecth as much mention about the hotel on Twitter as possible and distinguish between simple mention and reviews. You can now see all of those in the reviews tab for the hotel. It looks like this:
Twitter view
You can see there is not yet many reviews, but if you click on the + sign you will be directed to Twitter to write one with the hotel name and the hash tag already populated. Using a technology as easy as Twitter to make review is great a simple sms from your phone and the world will know this concierge is really awesome. So follow @syhinfo and post reviews on Twitter.
Add Placemarks, Lines and Shapes to your Gadget
2009-04-03We introduced some time ago a beautiful way to help people find hotels near the place you are promoting. You can provide an address or a specific location but nothing helps you to see where your attraction, venue or convention center is located in regards of these hotels.
Now you can. Just create a Google My Maps with your points of interest. In My Maps you can create placemarks, lines and shapes. For example you can draw an area describing where a specific event will take place. Or you can just add a placemark with a description where your convention center is located.
After you completed you map send us an email at info(at)seeyourhotel.com with the URL to your map. We’ll give you the HTML you need to add it to your site.
If you need help to make your map head to the Google My Maps help page.
Trip Planning Using Google Earth
2009-03-27Planning a trip in Google Earth is really fun. You can gather so much information in advance that you certainly get the most out of your vacations. I really want to explore Bryant Park and the New York Public Library next time I visit. I always stop by and look around when I’m in New York but I feel like I’m often missing as much as I’m seeing.
So I launch Google Earth, fly to Bryant Park and start looking around with the Panoramio pictures.
There is a lot of pictures. Looking at them, I get what most tourist look at and also some more special features that I certainly have missed in the past. There is not only pictures, I also watch YouTube videos of what is happening around.
The videos show events that happen in a surrounding like Fashion Week. I can see what kind of street performer are in the surrounding of the library too.
Now I can go deeper in the details, wikipedia offers a lot of information on the landmarks in a city. Knowing I want to specifically visit Bryant Park in my next stay, it could be a good idea to stay nearby. Having access to a site early in the morning or later at night, is often the best way to appreciate it fully with smaller crowds. SeeYourHotel has a solution to browse for hotels directly in Google Earth.
Also while I am browsing the hotels I have access to other pictures, this time from flickr. The blue stars are the landmarks from SeeYourHotel and they show those pictures.
Last but not least I want to know where i will be getting some of my snacks while staying in New York and I’m overdue to scout for new Pizza places.
Here it is, a half hour scouting of Bryant Park surrounding’s in Google Earth and I’m ready. Also I really enjoy looking at a destination that way. Its really a virtual visit that make me dream about my vacations and how it will be like when I’ll go.
Street View an Honest Walk Around. Always?
2009-03-17
Street View in Rome
I just love Google Street View. It’s such a nice way of exploring the streets around a Hotel where you wish to stay. Is there a vacant lot just around the corner or a beautiful park? those are the kind of questions you can answer with Google Street View. You can see street view for hotels located in the Cities where Google has deployed it. Like Paris, New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Sidney and many more, you can check on wikipedia for a more exhaustive list.
If you have not seen Street View on the site, it is one of the tab in the hotel information window. Here is a direct link to Street View in New York if you want to see it right now. What is there not to love about Street View then? It lets you see independent scenery surrounding hotels you wish to visit. That is true, but when was the picture taken? I think this is a problem that will only grow, you are capable to virtually visit many place on earth right now and you can see very reliably how those places looked 3 years ago… This will become more and more frustrating, what if Google film your street while a building was erected next to your hotel. As if those months of dealing with construction noise where not bad enough. You will have to handle 3+ years of customer getting cold feet seeing this scene in Street View. Those information are really time dependant and currently they are not presented as such, and until we get them near real-time, you should always take them with a grain of salt.
Javascript Support in Google Earth 5.0, Nice
2009-02-27Have you heard? Google Earth 5.0 is out and the information windows use webkit to render the description. This means you can insert javascript and iframe in your kml and it just work. We had to try it out. We added a new kml file to SeeYourHotel, showing the main site information windows.
Our site windows use Ajax for tabs and checking of availability for rooms, it also use an iframe to display a gadget from TripAdvisor. Now would it work. Yes, but not without some caveat.
The first thing that seems a bit strange is each description is it’s own HTML page. This makes sense, but it also force you to define all your common code in all the description tags, hopefully you just include the code. This could have been handled by global includes for the whole kml files, but it wouldn’t sit nicely with the kml standard. This also means your kml files could become pretty big even faster than before. Our solution to all this repetition and the size for now has been to use iframe. It is a bit slower, but the size of the kml to download stays small and our script includes are inside the iframe.
The cookies are not supported, so some of what we do for keeping track of dates of travel is not working. Someone at Google told us this was a security concern, maybe at a later date they will be supported. We haven’t done it yet, but we will do a session with some URL manipulation to keep track of the user preferences.
The last problem we encountered is the strange behavior of the post method. For all post we did from Google Earth, what we saw on the server was a get with no parameters. We changed our code to only use get, but this was acknowledged as a bug by Google. Normally it should be fixed soon and all the problems from not having post will vanish.
Our last concern is not technical but really about discover-ability, Ajax content is hard to get indexed. That’s the price you have to pay to make dynamic application. We will continue to enhance our kml and this is really an awesome addition by Google.
Choosing an hotel in the Algarve
2009-02-20The Algarve is famous principally for its picture-perfect beaches and year round fine weather, but there`s much more to the scenic region than just beach breaks. With a rich history, fascinating architecture, diverse natural landscape and a wealth of opportunity for outdoor adventure activities and adventure sports, alongside a world famous golf scene, the Algarve region of Portugal offers something for everyone. Choosing the right hotel is vital to making the most of your holiday, and it`s important to bear in mind the type of holiday you are looking for when booking a hotel. Perhaps the most important element to take into consideration when making your decision is location. Those looking for a beach holiday will naturally want to base themselves along the coast, but it is also important to consider whether you are looking for a family-friendly location, a party resort, or tranquil get-away-from-it-all escape to the sun. The town of Albufeira is perhaps the liveliest resort in the Algarve, and is home to any number of high rise hotels and large resorts. Many of these are family-friendly, and there are good beaches with watersports activities for children, teenagers and adults alike. Those looking for lively nightlife will find plenty of opportunity to party in Albufeira`s New Town, while holidaymakers looking for rest and relaxation will find a number of quiet resorts in tranquil locations on the outskirts of the town. Watersports enthusiasts would be wise to choose a hotel in or close to a major beach resort, as equipment hire, lessons and organized trips to remote beaches will be easier to arrange. Accomplished surfers, scuba divers etc may want to get further off the beaten track and hunt out quieter locations with good conditions for their chosen sport.
The Algarve is world famous as a top destination for golf, and there are hundreds of excellent courses dotted around the region. Many of the best courses are set within the grounds of luxury hotels, some good deals can be found on accomodation and golfing deals. Those looking to explore the region`s diverse architecture and experience a taste of the `real` Algarve may want to head for a quiet fishing village, or venture inland to a remote guesthouse surround by fruit groves and lush vegetation.
Families and travellers on a budget should consider apartment-hotels, which are equipped with kitchens and therefore allow for self-catering. Look at a number of online reviews before you book, and consider whether your hotel is recommended for partiers, families, couples or business travellers. To begin your search for the perfect hotel, visit Cheap Algarve Holidays.
