Hotelzon Brings GPS-based Hotel Shopping
Seeing as I’m currently planning a trip, this is something that I think is really cool, and something that I’ve been wanting to see for quite a while. UK-based Hotelzon has introduced an S60 application that uses your phone’s built-in GPS receiver to search for hotels. Brilliant. You can search for a specific radius around your current location, and you can tell the application how many rooms, for how many nights, and how many people.
Click search, and you’ll be presented with a list of nearby hotels, including star rating, nightly rate, and whether or not they even have rooms available (though I don’t know why you’d want to know about hotels that are fully booked, anyways). The application is free to download and use, aside from data charges.
I’ve been wanting to see GPS-based shopping and other services for a long time now. I’ve had a GPS unit hooked up to my phone since I had the Nokia N80 2 years ago, and up till now, the only thing I could really do was navigate and tag my photos. Thanks to Hotelzon, I can now shop for hotels, as well. I’ve got the app loaded on my phone, and will indeed be using it in October when I head out on a personal trip.
On a side note, Garmin Mobile XT allows you to use your GPS to do something similar, but that’s alot of overhead and cost for a such a simple task as finding a hotel. Hotelzon is a light application that does one thing, and allows plenty of advanced searching options, too.
Download Hotelzon Mobile here.
Now, if they only bring a similar app for affordable hostels (e.g. in cooperation with sites like hostels.com)… THAT would really make a GPS phone the perfect travellers companion ;)
Hmm.. not sure how useful this is – 99.99% of people book their hotel before they travel.