RoadTripHelper Helps You Find A Place to Stay Based on Where You’re Going

Last year when I went to New York City for DigitalLife, I quickly realized that while I knew where the event was being held, I didn't know much else about the surrounding area, especially where I should stay while I was in town. The convention center's site wasn't a ton of help when it came to finding a hotel, and I wound up searching for bargains on a couple of deal sites before finding something close and affordable. The year, I have RoadTripHelper, a Web service that shows you on an interactive Google Map what hotels are in the vicinity of a landmark or location that you provide. The service provides hotel ratings, contact information, photos, and even allows you to search multiple deal sites for rates and booking information.

RoadTripHelper is a Google Maps mashup that serves a very important purpose: helping you find a place to stay when you know where you're going, but you don't know much else about the area. Plenty of services allow you to search by hotel name or by zip code, but I haven't found many travel sites that allow you to tell the site where you're going first and make suggestions for your trip second. The service bills itself as a hotel price comparison utility, and its true that once you find hotels that you're interested in, the service will search over 30 sites, including Hotels.com, Priceline.com, HotelBook.com, Expedia, and Orbitz to find the best prices for rooms in the hotel you've selected. Before you can browse hotel prices however, you have to use the service to find or compare hotels.

Simply type your destination into the search box at RoadTripHelper, and the site will search for locations that match your search terms. Click the result that matches your location, and RoadTripHelper will populate a Google Map with hotels located in the vicinity of your destination. Whether you're headed to a conference in the middle of a city or you're planning a visit to family in the middle of nowhere, RoadTripHelper can find hotels in the area and plot them on a map. Zoom in or out on the map like any other Google Map, and if you see a hotel you're interested in or that's close to your destination, you can click on it for more information and the address of the hotel.

If you sign up for a free account at RoadTripHelper, you can add hotels to a custom favorites list to save for later, or to compare hotels against one another. Even without registering for an account, you can still read details of the hotel, check out how the hotel is rated on other travel sites, see other nearby hotels, and more. Additionally, you can always get driving directions to the hotel, send the hotel to a friend, read reviews of the hotel and check out photos of the hotel directly from the Google Map. All of the information that RoadTripHelper collects is aggregated from all of the hotel booking and travel sites that the service pulls its information form, so if you're browsing photos of a specific hotel, you may get better pictures if you select a different hotel booking site from the drop-down menu. The ratings and customer opinions are also aggregated from multiple sites.

If you're interested in booking the hotel, you can give the service the dates of your stay to see which hotel booking sites sell rooms for the hotel and what their current rates are. From there, you simply choose the hotel booking site that you prefer or that has the most affordable rooms and RoadTripHelper gets out of the way.

The service may not carry the beta tag, but it certainly behaves like a beta sometimes. Missing scroll bars, randomly refreshing Google Maps, and issues getting hotels to appear on the map after dragging and moving the map were all common problems when I used RoadTripHelper to investigate hotels near some of my vacation destinations. Even so, the service works well enough that its problems are easily overcome if you're determined to land a hotel near your travel destination and you need help finding one.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about RoadTripHelper is that it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. The service doesn't want to be a hotel booking site, or a massive travel search engine or vacation planning utility; it recognizes that other, more established companies do that already. It simply pulls the information it needs from those other services while simultaneously doing something that no other site seems to be able to do: lets you search for a place to stay based on where you're planning to visit.