Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Benicia, California, USA
Programs: AA PLT,AS,UA PLAT,PP,J6,FB,EY,LH,SQ,HH Gld,Hyatt Disc,Marriott Plat,IHG Plat
Posts: 11,016
Took a quick look and it looks useful. Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough, though--how is it much different from the spg.com tool that let's you find award and C+P availability (plus best available rate) if you plug in a given city or country? The point, I guess, is that it does save a step by just indicating which properties have that availability rather than the spg.com approach that lists all of those (including those lacking availability) in a given locale.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but so far you have to search by something more specific than country. I was interested in finding the award and C+P availability for the Luxury Collection hacienda properties in Mexico, for example, but unlike spg.com couldn't find them by simply putting Mexico in the "Where" box.
Also, it seems that if you plug in the name of a hotel, it sometimes doesn't pop up and in any event the results are uneven. For example, for March 18, 2011 when I plugged in Hacienda Puerta Campeche, Mexico nothing came up. When I deleted Hacienda, the hotel did pop up, along with Hacienda Santa Rosa (and a third property). But when I plugged in Santa Rosa, Mexico, nothing came up.
I agree that the associated link for finding hotel rates is useful for rack rates and quite possibly other purposes.
Anyway, don't take any of the above as criticism. I very much appreciate what you're doing. FWIW, I'd suggest the following improvements if possible:
1. Allow search by country. Certainly for the U.S. and possibly a few other countries you'd of course have to place a limit on the results. But most countries have fewer Starwood properties than, say, San Francisco, which returned about 20 results when I plugged that in.
2. Allow search by hotel names.
3. Right now if you get results you have to click back to the original search page to do a new search; you can't simply plug in a new search on the results page. To save that one small step, it would be nice if you could plug in a new search on the results page.
4. The map that pops up for results is really narrow. Perhaps make room for it by deleting the hotel photos associated with each result.
Anyway, thanks again!