So, based on the personas you will be focusing on a few destinations. For example if the niche is beach destinations, your focus may be Miami and other beach destinations. Trending destination allows you to focus on a few destinations based on your personas and promote them to the home page of your website. The system automatically picks up 3 hotels based on the criteria of price, amenities and star rating that you specify. So, you can say, you’d like all 3 star and above hotels that are priced under $150 per night and are on the beach.
This way the persona works in tandem with the trending destinations. A more button will take the user to a page that is built specially for that destination. Here the system pulls in all the details of the destination.
Popular hotels
This is a list of hotels that have been pre-selected by Expedia based upon their business intelligence parameters. It has been observed that hotels that are best value with reference to the price, location, popular with travelers and star rating are available with Expedia. We have carefully used their business intelligence program to display these hotels with an average price for your customers to get a ready reference. This helps with a direct call to action.
Hotels by Star Rating
Most hotel based sites will first ask you to put in the check in and check out dates before you can select the star rating of the hotel. But human psychology works on different paradigms. The flexibility to check for a hotel by star rating, check it’s average price and other details gives a human mind the much needed authority to make decisions. On the part of the OTA, it allows the promotion of the link using paid and/or organic search.
Hotels by Chain
The destination page shows the list of chains and the corresponding number of hotels against each brand of hotels. Again most travelers are fond of certain chain of hotels like the starwoods or the Hyatts of the world. It is important to publish this link organically. This will allow the search engines to display the list of hotels by a certain chain or brand.
Hotels by Landmarks
Most often you will find people relating to a landmark within a city rather than a city itself. This is critical for the success of an online booking engine. Getting the location of a hotel by a landmark or by neighborhood is not an easy task to say the least. It involves the triangulation of three different geo locations (latitudes and longitudes set) to get the exact location of the hotel vis-a-vis the landmark or neighborhood. Such care is taken to build this using the Expedia Affiliate API, that your users will never have a problem booking a hotel on your engine.
Special deals for the destination
When vacationing on budget or finding the best value for the location you wish to travel to, finding the best deal can become a bit of a challenge. You may have noticed that some hotels will give the fourth night free if you stay for 3 nights. Some hotels may give ridiculous discounts on some days when their daily occupancy rates are low and they have to meet their daily occupancy rate targets. Using EAN’s API, we have worked out the deals in the background and displayed them on the page of the city or landmark. This way your visitors can make a much informed decision and get the best value for their money. You can also, pick these deals up and promote them on your social media pages. If the deal matches with your persona, your visitors will definitely give you a brownie point for the intimation and advise.
Weather and Map widgets
So when you look at this page, it is very comprehensive and caters to the needs of every traveler. Maps and weather are very important to a few. The hotel may say that they are only 100 meters from the beach, but a person like me would like to validate it using a map. In another section we also see how a user can use the street view provided by google to validate the claims of the hotels and OTA’s.
