Herein lies my review of Hotel Reservations (hotelreservations.com), for the purpose of the review I will refer to the site as HR.
The interface for HR is reasonable, quite plain and grey in colour, I would think for a holiday/hotel kind of site it should have a more colourful and exciting interface to get people in the mood for holidays.
The central tabs DO NOT work in Firefox and nothing happens when you click them, they do however work fine in Internet Explorer. There’s a mark down for lack of cross-browser support.
Companies really should ensure everything works on all platforms before releasing to the market as 3rd party browsers like Firefox and Opera do have a large market share.
The country switch feature also works differently on IE than on Firefox.
There are grammar and spelling mistakes in the page which give a bad impression of the site and would make me wonder about their professionalism.
This should be Advance I guess, and well to be grammatically correct it should actually be Advanced.
The range of hotels available is good but it just looks like it’s plucked from some API from a back-end system.
The prices are reasonable, I found a good range when searching for hotels in Kuala Lumpur, they have a good range of hotels available all around the world.
I was unable to call the booking line as I am not based in the US so any reservations I make would be via the net directly.
The site has Adsense at the bottom of the page, I don’t see any reason why a commercial site like this should have any 3rd party adverts?
Overall the site is ok, it’s nothing special, there’s no cool AJAX interface, the HTML isn’t cross browser compatible, they have some pointless Adsense adverts, there are spelling and grammar mistakes and the only plus points are decent prices and a good range of hotels, but can’t you find those on any old hotel site?
In this kind of space you really have to add value and differentiate yourself using your interface, as to a consumer that’s all you are.
Now is the age of the social web, it’s time to harness tagging, blogging and community building to support your product or service, don’t try and focus only on traditional means online, try and use new and unique strategies.
Good idea, but bad execution and poor quality control.
This is a sponsored post.
. I thought it was some kind of sappy self-help book, but I wanted to know why fairly sane people kept raving about it.
