Mountain View, California — Travelers can now conveniently make their exclusive selection of hotel close to their desired place of attraction or destination with a new tool called “Hotel Finder” launched by Google last July. The company has just announced a brand new feature that empowers you to search for hotels all over the world, based on their distance from a specific location of your choice.
While many popular travel search engines can only display the hotel’s location on a map, Google’s experimental Hotel Finder just moved a step ahead with an unique feature, making it easier to narrow down your choice of hotels when you are traveling.
The more realistic travel-search options mean travelers can search directly for a point of interest such as a tourist attraction. The tool, which streamlines to find hotels, shows you their location on a map, as well as additional details including location, rate, images and reviews. Google then populates hotel results based on a 20-minute default distance from a point of interest.
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Click to enlarge… Image Credit: (Google)
The tool is pretty functional for just about anyone – from businessmen who wishes to find a hotel close to the city center, to tourists who want to be close to the city’s most popular attractions.
To practically utilized the new feature, all you have to do is search for a landmark or address in the area you wish to stay. Also, you can tweak the results depending on your preference, changing the time it takes to get there to anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, and you can also choose walking distance, as opposed to how long it takes to get there via public transport.
With the ability to refine hotels by travel time, price, ratings and reviews as well as hotel class, the search method has been called “unique and useful” by reviewers such as searchengineland.com.
Besides, the transit time search is only available in cities where Google has partnered with local transit agencies to get their data in Google Maps. Not only has the service elaborated to include international destinations including Australia, it also now lets you search for a hotel by entering the name of a popular attraction and showing hotels within a given distance of that location by public transport.
Finding a decent hotel that is handy and affordable requires effort, but Google’s tool is not a bad place to start.