Appreciate all feedback. The website is clearly the weak link and not what we focused our time on for this to start. Our mistake there, we focused on the query & results presentation tech and not the simple input UI appearance. We saw value in saving people from manually entering 90+ codes and focused on addressing that problem. We clearly have a weakness in our UI and are working on a complete overhaul with a much better user experience.
If you have all valid inputs, we feel the service is worth the $1 to save you the time of entering all those codes manually. That said, we do see how the interface is a barrier and we are going to be addressing that shortly. We clearly under-estimated the issues that would be encountered on the input side and are addressing that.
Unfortunately, this service cannot be free due to the resources required and the finite amount of searches that our resources can execute without having a negative impact on the Marriott.com web site. If we made it free it'd be like UA's upgrade where everyone applies and many are disappointed to find they're number 45 on the ugprade list
. We don't want people having to wait long times before their searches execute.
And, we felt $1 was worth the time savings versus manually entering in each code at the Marriott.com website and then tracking the results of each code and which hotels were available. Mikelat had a system for this involving notepad, chrome, and excel. But he was glad to have us automate all that and within 10 mins give him a simple csv file to view/sort/filter.
We do welcome those wanting to be beta testers. We can't open it up totally free though as then our backlog would likely be too long and we'd have unhappy customers there anyways.
For now, we're considering shuttering the site for a couple days until we get a new pretty UI up and running.