Hotels-Wizard.com, what I am working on..

April 16, 2010

This is a brief article to introduce my new site www.hotels-wizard.com. It’s an hotel, hostel, B&B, apartment serarch engine running on a HotelsCombined affiliation platform.

Through www.hotels-wizard.com it is possible to search hotels in more then 30 accredited and well-established hotel reservation portals at once. The search for hotels will be mainly performed by city.

The reservation process follows 4 main steps:

Typing destination, number of guests, check-in check-out dates on the homepage search box;
Browsing the list of hotels. During this step it is possible to sort hotels by “popularity”, “price”, “stars”, “names”, “distance”. Here we can choose the room we would like stay in.
The third step offers a list of hotel reservation suppliers: all well-established, popular and safe hotel reservation portals; names such as Booking.com, Hotels.com, Venere.com, Expedia.com Travelocity.com etc … in one screen we will have a complete list of suppliers offering the room type and the hotel we have chosen. Here we can compare nearly all offers available online for that room and choose the in which website we want to complete our reservation.
Once we have chosen our room and the portal offering the best deal, we will be redirected to the supplier we have chosen website where we can review all the rooms facilities, pictures and terms and conditions. So the reservation will be performed not on www.hotels-wizard.com but safely on the supplier’s site we have chosen.

Hotels-wizard.com is now on its 0.04 development stage: it’s already fully functional but still needs some small improvement. At the moment supports English and Chinese; in a very short time Italian will be added, ideally in a few months the site will be available in German, Spanish, French and Japanese.

A multilingual blog is also on it’s way to be online. The blog will provide useful information on holiday destinations, tips and tricks for travelers and hotel reviews.

The concept and the name of the website is a “wizard”: both is its means of magic maker (here where the slogan comes from “do the magic .. get the best deal”) and of an easy-few-steps reservation assisted procedure.

The logo is a Hotel with four coloured stars: the stars represent the “magic” of the “wizard”. A variation of the logo is the same image in a postage stamp.

All the graphics has been made using Inkscape and Gimp. The site is written in HTML with some PHP, and JavaScript.