As reported back in May, Shopping.com plans to tightly integrate its Epinions reveiws into its new hotel vertical and bring “it’s proprietary assets – structure, organization, and productization” to the hotel category. While the vertical is not yet complete, we can now get a better sense of how the end product might look.
As with the productization Shopping.com has done with its other verticals, users can narrow down choices by features such as Hotel Amenities, Recommended Travel Type, and Room Amenities. This is an improvement over the current categorization on Epinions which only allows users to choose hotels by ‘Chain’ or ‘Recommended Travel Type.’ While Shopping.com has done an impressive job allowing the user to sort by important room amenities such as Sprinklers in Rooms and Toilet (interesting to note that only 169 out of 50,000+ hotels feature toilets!), it’s a little annoying having to choose one amenity after another versus being able to choose multiple amenities at once (Become.com’s new price comparison engine will feature this type of system and SideStep currently offers a similar check-box system).
After narrowing down choices, users can sort hotels by rating or price. Ratings seem to be taken directly from Epinions.com reviews. While Shopping.com encourages users to write reviews (at the moment, most hotels only have a couple reviews), users are taken to an Epinions page where they eventually have to register to submit the reveiw. The Epinions page looks completely different than the Shopping.com page, so there is a bit of a branding issue.
At the moment, there are no prices listed for any of the hotels, but hidden at the bottom of each hotel review page, there is a link to compare prices. Once clicked, you see a message which reads “Sorry, there are no offers available from any of our stores at this time.”
I’ll be in the SF starting tomorrow for eBay Live! and Vertical Leap, so I’ll try to meet with someone at Shopping.com for more information.
