I stumbled across a website which was just launched last Thursday.  The site is Room 77, and it claims to be the world’s first hotel room search engine.

ID 102111034 © Mohamed Ahmed Soliman | Dreamstime.com

Room 77 uses Google Maps combined with a hotel’s floor plan to determine the precise latitude, longitude and altitude of each specific room.  The user selects from various room categories and preferences (for example, 1 person, king-sized bed, high floor).  This produces a listing of the rooms, ranked based on your selections.  There is also an amazingly accurate computer-generated image of the view from each room listed. I attached a screen shot below for an example.

Since the site is so new, there undoubtedly will be improvements and additions along the way.  According to the General Manager and VP of Product at Room 77, Kevin Fleiss, “We currently have 500 hotels in 16 cities live on Room 77, and we aim to add one to two cities per month once we achieve critical mass in a destination. Our ultimate goal is to include room information on 3–5 star hotels in cities across the globe.”

For now, there is no general search option; you can only search within a specific hotel, but change is planned there.  Fleiss stated, “Right now we are focused on growing the breadth and depth of our database. We do plan on offering the ability to search by city in the near term.” Fleiss also stated that some hotels are providing in-room images.  Adding these images to the site would be time-consuming and labor–intensive, but it would really be awesome.

Room 77 has already proved useful for a hotel reservation I researched in San Francisco.  The planned changes will make Room 77 even better.  I am looking forward to seeing how it develops.

— John Wroblewski, distribution specialist