Make hotel searching easier with Hipmunk’s new natural language search

By Lulu Chang Published August 18, 2016

Sometimes, a great vacation just involves a lot of room service. And if that’s the case, you’re definitely going to need to find the right hotel to serve as your temporary home away from home. With Hipmunk’s new and improved hotel search function, that process might have just become a bit easier.

Rather than requiring users to open dozens of tabs to compare rates and amenities from a myriad of different websites, Hipmunk offers a more concise solution. Chief among the newest features of the Hipmunk platform is its new natural language processing ability, which means that your keyword searches are more powerful than ever. You can now ask the site to “find a 3-star hotel in NYC close to Central Park and under $400,” and actually find relevant results. “We’re excited to introduce a new, groundbreaking way to make customers happy in their quest for a perfect accommodation,” said Nancy Hang, Hipmunk’s SVP of Product. “To be able to type simple queries just like you do in a search engine is a huge step forward.”

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Moreover, your results will be shown by way of images — and they’re seven times larger than before, too.

When you click on one of these images, it flips over to reveal the most important information in an accessible format. Is there a pool? Is there Wi-Fi? Hipmunk will tell you instantly. Finally, you can now “favorite” a hotel to see it plotted on a map, so if you’re trying to sightsee and sleep in, you’ll know just how convenient that will be.

“Finding the right hotel means considering dozens of criteria, including price, ratings, amenities, and location,” noted Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein. “For many travelers, parsing those factors presented too many choices, leading to agony. Our latest product update aims to make this much simpler,”

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