Adding City Center Search to Hotel Hustle

One of the key bits of feedback I’ve received about Hotel Hustle in the couple months it has been live is that the city selection options in the search pick list needed work. I completely agree. As of this week the pick list option is much improved, adding a few thousand more cities to select from and more ways to identify what city you want. And the change to the search results – particularly with respect to filtering – is dramatic.

Airports are a great base for searching if you want to sleep near an airport. But that’s not so useful on most stays. Alas, the initial search focused on airports, mostly because I already had that list in the system. But choosing to filter by distance meant getting hotels near the airport, not near a city center. There are now city center locations in the pick list for the 1,000 largest cities in the world plus nearly every city in the USA available in the pick list. Just start typing and you should see the difference.

You can still choose the airport location and get search results centered there.

But filtering by distance yields less than desirable results for finding hotels in town.

Choose the city name instead and the initial search results look roughly identical.

But the distance filter now is focused on the city center; the results are MUCH more useful.

There are also now tens of thousands of cities available to pick from which do not have a commercial airport close enough to be useful as a search parameter. A specific example a user asked about at one point is Tulare, CA. Turns out that’s a real place, much to my surprise. And rather than just searching by Fresno or Bakersfield and hoping that the results were close enough it is now possible to search on Tulare and thousands of other cities by name. These choices were previously available by ZIP code if you happened to know the digits but now they can be selected by city name, too.

Hopefully this helps make your searches just a bit easier!