Personalized Travel Search Engine Room 77 Now Allows You To Book Hotel Rooms

Room 77, a comprehensive search engine and review site focused exclusively on hotel rooms, is rolling out the ability to actually book hotels from its site. Starting today, travelers can now use Room 77 to compare prices across a variety of room types, and book more than 120,000 hotels worldwide.

Room 77, which officially launched in public beta in February, has collected and indexed data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties and also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers. The site provides travelers with specific details about each hotel room at a property, including the room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 also generates a virtual Room View, simulating the actual view from that room’s window using Google Earth-enabled technology.

For three- to five-star hotels booked through Room 77, travelers get access to a complimentary Room ConciergeS, who leverages Room 77’s proprietary RoomMatch technology to identify the best rooms for each traveler then works directly with the hotel to try to score one on the traveler’s behalf.

With the new booking feature, Room 77 will reveals prices directly in search results, from Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotels.com, Cheaptickets and others. You can compare pricing for multiple room categories in grid view, which allows you to see what the next category room includes and for how much more that will cost you.

Travelers can also refine a hotel search based on unique hotel and room criteria, such as view type, free Wi-Fi, free parking, free breakfast and free airport shuttle in addition to common filters, such as price, star ratings, location, and amenities. And for thousands of hotels, Room 77 shares insider tips its team has “Heard in the Lobby,” offering advice on the best rooms for views, quietness and size, as well as:

As we’ve written in the past, Room 77 is a useful service as long as it collects the right intelligence on hotels. That’s why the startup has been partnering with hotel groups to provider accurate information. And combining this with the ability to to book makes a lot of sense and could give it a leg up in terms of competition from user reviews giant TripAdvisor.