Wednesday, April 19, 2006

VirtualTourist.com - Largest Social Travel Site?

VirtualTourist.com - Travel Guides, Maps, Photos, Forums, Deals, more:

"Worldwide Travel Guide. Tips, Reviews & Photos plus Hotels, Restaurants, Activities & More"

VirtualTourist.com may be the largest travel social website today, with over 700,000 members. In the previous 24 hours prior to this posting there were: 1,075 new travel tips posted; 2,034 new forum postings; 1,175 new page comments; 76 new travel deals; and 432 new members!

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TripAdvisor.com is also a much visited social-like website (19 million visit per month), though with a much more narrow focus on accommodation reviews -- over 4 million user reviews, so far.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

PAGUNA - Hotel Bookings in AJAX

PAGUNA.com

This is probably the slickest hotel booking site yet! I do not know if they have the best prices, but I do know that it is fun to use!

I received this note from the developers:

By utilizing AJAX, we were able to design the website so that the customer can complete the entire booking process on one HTML page.

From our point of view, the utilization of AJAX in a hotel booking website increases usability greatly. By fitting the entire booking process onto one page, Paguna enables the user the always know which step of the booking he currently is in, and the search and booking processes is easier and more efficient. If you compare using Paguna with “traditional” hotel reservation websites, you will notice how much more quickly you can make changes, read hotel information, and look at pictures of the hotel when using Paguna.

As far as we know, Paguna is the first commercial application of its kind which uses AJAX intensively in order to realize a new usability concept.

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Another apparently Ajax-based hotel (and hostel) booking site is TripMojo. It is very basic, however, in comparison to Paguna, and seems to rely on any casual viewer (including hotels, themselves) to add information and links to the accommodations that are included.