I've been pretty dissatisfied with most of the mobile hotel search and booking sites I've tried. I don't know what it is about this category but hotel sites always seem to have serious usability problems; unnecessarily complex search forms, illogically sorted results, listings for hotels that turn out to have no availability, "bait and switch" pricing or prices buried several levels deep making comparison shopping unnecessarily complex.
This week KeyToss launched a new mobile hotel booking service at h.keytoss.com. I've covered KeyToss before. It's a personalized mobile homepage similar to iGoogle or NetVibes. I like KeyToss, it's feature rich and enables adding a lot more types of content than the rather limited mobile versions of iGoogle and NetVibes. According to KeyToss their hotel site is "...the Most Advanced Hotel Booking Service on the Mobile Web". That's a bold claim and I approached the site skeptically but with high hopes.
KeyToss is location enabled as much as is possible with current technology. It tries to use geolocation to find you so you don't have to enter your location. KeyToss can geolocate on Android and Windows Mobile phones using Google's Gears, BlackBerry's with the BlackBerry browser's built in location support and on the iPhone with the help of Alocola, a free open source app. KeyToss is not limited to the US either,covering 60 countries on five continents.
Even without geoloacation it's pretty easy to use KeyToss. The search form has only one required field, your location. If it hasn't been prepopulated by geolocation it will accept your free form entry of a neighborhood, address, landmark, city, airport code, postal code or geo-coordinates. The rest of the search form is prepopulated with logical defaults; one room for tonight, rated at least two stars, under $250, for one person, for one night. All of those can of course be changed.
The results seem to be mostly sorted by price, from lowest to highest. There doesn't appear to be any way to change the sort to distance from your location, which given KeyToss' geolocation ability, would be a great feature for trying to find a room at the last minute in an unfamiliar city.
The listings include only available rooms with the lowest available base price for each hotel shown right in the initial listing along with a link to a map. Clicking on a particular hotel in the list of results will give the bottom line price, including taxes and fees, and considerable detail on each property; amenities, available services and pet and cancellation policies. KeyToss iteself does not have a cancellation charge but individual hotels often do.
KeyToss gets its inventory from Hotels.com and seems to have a huge number of properties available. A search for a room for tonight under $100 (which is considered very cheap) in downtown San Francisco returned 85 results including a $99 deal at a well located four star hotel!
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posted by Dennis Bournique
April 27, 2009 @ 11:57 am
7 View Comments
