Yahoo! Inc., a leading global internet company, today announced the beta of its Yahoo! FareChase hotel product…
Yahoo! Inc., a leading global internet company, today announced the beta of its Yahoo! FareChase hotel product (http://farechase.yahoo.com), an important extension of the Yahoo! FareChase travel search offering announced in August of 2004. Expanding on the ability to search for flights, this beta offers consumers the opportunity to search multiple trusted hotel sites including hotel chains and online travel agencies to find the best hotel and related travel information available online. With unbiased search results and easy bookings directly with provider sites, the product eliminates the need for multiple online searches, saving consumers time, effort and money by using one trusted travel source.
The new Yahoo! FareChase hotel product offers a variety of powerful search, sorting, and refining capabilities, which are presented to users through an easy-to-use interface. The customized, dynamic sorting instantly redisplays results by price or distance from specified location and automatically lists hotel amenities, address and distance in miles. The hotel beta also provides features and tools that help make choosing a hotel easier, such as hotel photos, user ratings and reviews, interactive maps that display hotels and attractions, and other useful travel content.
“As part of Yahoo!’s commitment to providing the best search experience on the Web, consumers now have a free, relevant and unbiased product to help them find and book travel quickly and easily,” said Yen Lee, General Manager of Travel at Yahoo!. “This beta launch marks just the beginning of what we are capable of providing for travelers and will continue to leverage our world-class search technology and content to provide the most valuable travel search solution to our users.”
New Benefits of Yahoo! FareChase Hotel Beta
Available today, the Yahoo! FareChase hotel beta provides users with:
- Unbiased Results – A real-time search quickly displays main results in a free, relevant and unbiased manner
- Ease of Use – Users experience a simple search for hotel availability with dates by city, airport or address
- Comprehensiveness – Yahoo! FareChase leverages the vast Yahoo! network including user ratings and reviews of specific hotel properties from Yahoo!’s community of 165 million active registered users
- Rich Hotel Content — All listings in the hotel beta provide users with the hotel’s address, distance in miles from the specified search location, detailed information on hotel amenities, and standard hotel star ratings
- Precision – Users have the option of narrowing hotel searches by star rating, price ranges, neighborhood, brand, keywords such as the hotel name, or desired amenities
- Access – Available to both PC and Macintosh users with support for Internet Explorer and Firefox
- Integration into the Yahoo! Network – Yahoo! FareChase is currently accessible through Yahoo! Travel Homepage, Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Shopping
During the beta phase, Yahoo! will continue to expand and improve this new hotel search offering, both in terms of hotel content and functionality. We will also seek user feedback that will be used to help make additional product refinements.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
