Yapta.com, an online travel website that tracks airline ticket prices for travelers has added a hotel price tracking service that will help consumers monitor and compare pricing for 110,000 national and international hotels. Basically, Yapta lets consumers choose a hotel that best suits their travel needs and then sign up to be automatically alerted if and when the price drops for a particular stay.
Yapta has included several useful features to help consumers track hotel prices. First, the site will collect the lowest published rate of a tracked hotel and will create a graph that visually demonstrates the price of the hotel over time. Users can also track multiple hotels at once and compare pricing. Alerts can be customized by drop in price or by the frequency of alerts received. And like many travel sites, users can search for hotels by filters, including star rating, price, and amenities.
Yapta previously focused only on airfare flight tracking, where you can track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines. Similar to the hotel feature, Yapta allows users to select flights to track, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. (Read our original review here).
The key functionality for Yapta is the tracking feature-it’s definitely a useful and easy way to compare travel prices without the hassle of having to constantly monitor changes in hotel and flight prices. Microsoft’s Farecast forecasts flight and hotel prices and then evaluates if the given price is a deal based on past fare history, but the site doesn’t actually track flights and hotels for you. Originally a browser add-on, Yapta became a website last year and is steadily growing in popularity (the site now has 600,000 registered users compared to 350,000 users in June of 2008). This new feature should be appealing to anyone looking for a travel deal, which is basically the entire world right now.
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