In an effort to keep travelers who might be checking out the reviews for hotels on Yelp’s website or in its mobile apps instead of going elsewhere when it comes time to book lodging, Yelp announced today that it’s teamed up with travel site Hipmunk to offer hotel reservations directly to users.
The new service starts today, the companies announced in a press release, and allows customers to book hotels through Hipmunk while never leaving Yelp. The twosome says “tens of thousands of U.S. hotels” will be accessible to Yelpers.
The ideal plan for Yelp and Hipmunk here would be users surfing Yelp for hotel reviews, deciding on a spot and then choosing the new “Reserve a Room” option, and Hipmunk then confirms the reservation and sends customers a confirmation email.
For those wading through lists of hotel results without finding one that has the option to book through Yelp, there’s a new filter for Online Reservations that will pull up results. Pickings may be slim — I had 12 results when I filtered for online booking through Yelp in Manhattan, out 14,349 total hotel listings on Yelp.
“After launching Yelp Platform, we knew we wanted to expand to additional categories,” said Mike Ghaffary, VP Business and Corporate Development at Yelp. “Our goal is to make it easy to book appointments and other services directly through Yelp, and partnering with Hipmunk is a great win for Yelp consumers.”
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
No comments:
Post a Comment