Up until now, if you’ve heard of Hipmunk, it has been as the “easy flight search service”. But today they’re adding another layer to their business. It’s an obvious one, but a big one: hotel search.
Like their flight search options, if you jump to the hotel search side, you’re presented with simple fields to fill out: “where”, “in”, and “out” — for where you’re going, when you’re going, and when you’re leaving. When you fill those out, the search engine takes off and brings you back a list of hotels in a visual way. But instead of being a graph, like airfare search returns, you get a nice big map with the hotels displayed as colorful dots on it.
And just like airfare search, there are options to filter the hotel results. In this case, you can filter by “Price”, “Reviews”, and even “Ecstasy”. Yes, ecstasy. In fact, that’s the default option. “We rank our results by ‘ecstasy’ by default, a combination of price, amenities, and Yelp reviews,” the team says.
There are also info overlays that can be put on the map with the click of a button to see which hotel options are close to things like food, nightlife, and, awesomely, vice.
Finally, Hipmunk hotel search has one more little bonus: it’s not just hotels. The service also looks up Airbnb places nearby for you to rent on a vacation. That combination alone will make Hipmunk hotel search useful to some people.
