Filtering made simple

Posted on June 28th, 2007 in news by Marc

I have been really busy recently, but have had some time to re-do the filtering interface. Before you had to select from multiple disjointed dropdown menus. I don’t think it was very clear or intuitive. I took the interface of the Travelgoop Bid Wizard and applied it to the regular Travelgoop filter. Now, you select what website, area, and/or star level you want. Travelgoop will then filter your selection. This should be a solid improvement and will allow Travelgoopers to find pricing information more easily.

In addition, when you add your purchase information into Travelgoop you can now enter the full hotel price, leave comments and post hotel reviews.
1) By entering the optional hotel website listed price for your purchase, you can keep track of your savings. As you add purchases, Travelgoop keeps track of your total savings. While this isn’t ground breaking, it’s nice to see the savings add up over time. Have you saved over $1000 this year by using Priceline and/or Hotwire? Enter your purchase information and find out.

2) The purchase comments is a place for you to tell other Travelgoopers how you arrived at the purchase that you made. This could include strategy information or comments about how you researched the purchase or whether you are happy with the outcome. Really, anything that is related to the purchase should be put here. So your thoughts will live on and hopefully enlighten a future visitor.

3) The hotel reviews part of this isn’t fully implemented and I’m not sure what I am going to do there. There are already several hotel review websites out there, but I think it would be neat to have hotel reviews written by and for people getting them at a discount. I think one’s perspective of a hotel is different when you are staying there for half price.

It’s a formidable scent… It stings the nostrils. In a good way.

Hotel Overload

Posted on June 18th, 2007 in news by Marc

I have added hotel pages. This is ideal for if you are looking for a specific hotel or if you want to learn more about a hotel. I will be adding more information to these hotel pages when I get a chance. Hopefully, this will be a nice expansion.

Some of you will also notice that I changed the way that one enters a successful purchase. I added some more fields to provide more information (the advertised price on the hotel’s website for the same nights, purchase comments, hotel reviews, etc), although these are all optional. By entering in this information, you can keep track of your own savings and past strategies and hotel thoughts. It will be a nice tool for people to have in addition to other Travelgoop functions.

Sweet.

Site updates… still?

Posted on June 12th, 2007 in news by Marc

So, there are still small updates here and there. Definitely not as fast as furious as they were coming before. I have added the Travelgoop Bid Wizard link back to the site because I think it’s very cool. Just say what you want and for how much and the bid wizard will tell you what you need to do. You can find the link at the bottom left corner of the page under the Travelgoop Blog link.

I also added more interesting map functionality so that each page of data results in a marker on the map. I am still playing around with a couple of things here, but you get the gist.

Welcome to all the new users. May we all save some money with Travelgoop.

Until next time, stay clean.

Hotwire’s New Travel Ticker - Pretty solid

Posted on June 12th, 2007 in hotwire by Marc

Hotwire rolled out a new feature called Travel Ticker (http://www.hotwire.com/travelticker/). It resembles travelzoo.com in that it presents noteworthy deals that are available in all aspects of travel. Doing a quick survey of the hotels shows a 3* hotel for $59 and a mountain resort for $89. Sounds good to me. Not ground breaking, but worth checking out if you have a moment.

Going on a cruise? Get a free iPod Shuffle

Posted on June 9th, 2007 in priceline by Marc

Priceline is running a promotion for a free iPod Shuffle “when you book an oceanview stateroom
or higher on select 7-night sailings”. The promotion ends June 30. If you are considering this type of vacation, you might as well book it at Priceline and snag this. They have competitive cruise prices, so it looks like a good deal to me.

Improved search

Posted on June 9th, 2007 in news by Marc

I did a lot of behind the scenes work today. The search should be quicker. I also overhauled the hotel system, so now all hotels should be accessible for adding purchases. This means users no longer need to email me hotel entries when they want to enter something that isn’t there. The trade-off for this is that it only currently supports the US. I will try to improve upon this at some point to allow for hotel searching outside of the US.
People are continuing to sign up. Thank you everyone for submitting your purchases. We are all helping each other by contributing.

And I’m spent.

New Layout

Posted on June 4th, 2007 in news by Marc

Returning visitors will notice that the layout of Travelgoop has changed pretty substantially. I assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the site and what consumers ultimately want. As a result, I have dropped much of the excess functionality like the forum and Bid Wizard for now. The strength of this website is in the data and the way in which it is presented. As a result, Travelgoop has changed to allow visitors full access to successful hotel pricing information and a variety of filters and sorts to get maximum utility.

Another important change that lends itself well to the new layout is expanding the Travelgoop to allow purchases from any hotel vendor to be posted. Most notably, hotwire.com consumers will now have access to this system. This all still needs work, but it is functional at this point.

More work is still to come, but I am much happier with the new layout and I hope you all are as well.

Keep on keepin’ on