See Your Hotel's Blog » Uncategorized

New Booking Process

henribechac — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:16:24 +0000

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.

Sites to Help Choose A Hotel Location

henribechac — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:21:10 +0000

We 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

henribechac — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:48:32 +0000

That’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.

Add Placemarks, Lines and Shapes to your Gadget

seeyourhotel — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:43:44 +0000

We 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

henribechac — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:41:36 +0000

Planning 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.

Javascript Support in Google Earth 5.0, Nice

seeyourhotel — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:16:20 +0000

Have 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.

A New Gadget, This One Can Make You Money!

seeyourhotel — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:56:13 +0000

You can look it up, it allows anyone with a website to host a map showing hotels around a specific location. Send us an email and we will provide you with the code for your site.

It can be centered on landmarks, or cities or even just coordinates. If you are planning an event with people coming from out of town this is a nice addition. Not only will you make money, you will also provide a great way for attendees to find close by hotels.

See Your Hotel in Italian

henribechac — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:48:20 +0000

We just launched the Italian version of the site is up. We will continue to Spanish and then to other languages we will have more difficulty validating ourselves. Obviously if anyone spot an error, let us know and we will correct it. Here are some links to go directly to the Italian version or the Italian welcome page.

iPhone with Google Maps. A dream come true for SeeYourHotel

seeyourhotel — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:06:40 +0000

Some time ago we did an iPhone application for stranded travelers. Our idea was: your plan fell through and you need an hotel near you and now. We already had the info, so we packaged it for the iPhone and our first application was born. Soon we got request to let the user select a place different from their current location. We thought this was just logical. But how to have the user select a location easily that respect what we do on SeeYourHotel? We certainly don’t want to go back to 1997 and list hundreds of hotels for a whole city when most people have a much clearer idea of the place where they want to stay.

We thought about it and showing the hotels on the map was the way to go. We can’t help it, we love Google Maps so much, and it is already on the phone so why not use it. We read a bit on the web and saw that maybe Apple would not be very cool about us using Google Maps. Nonetheless we decided to try it, with a simple first function of showing the hotels around the current location. It worked very well, we were happy and we submitted the update. What we read was true, Apple doesn’t like for developers to use non-published API, so our application was rejected.

I wonder if it is really Apple’s fault in this case, on Android we could use Google Maps all we want and Google would be really OK with it, but not so on the iPhone. Is it Google that doesn’t want the maps feature already available on the iPhone to be inaccessible or is it Apple? So now we have to look for alternative mapping solution on the iPhone. I wonder why after letting everybody see in their ads how fabulous the integration of Google Maps on the iPhone was, they don’t let developers push it even farther?

SeeYourHotel in French

henribechac — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:28:58 +0000

That’s right the site is now available in “Français”. We will introduce other language soon, but we tested the capacity of the site to handle more than one language by doing it in French first. So if you prefer to search for hotels in french, be our guest and tell us what problems remain. Also if you want to tell us which language to tackle next, go ahead. We are looking at Spanish, Italian and Deutsch.

We keep the homepage in English but there are language selection flag in the upper right. Also you can bookmark those link to go directly to the site in french. If you prefer the welcome page is also in French.