It’s been a long day. You’ve finally gotten to your hotel room, and the only thing you can think of is the twelve hour snoozefest you’re about to enjoy. Just as you’re about to nod off, you hear it: the slow, metallic squeal of the ice machine next-door that will test your sanity for the rest of the night.
TripKick, a new travel review site that launched today, hopes to put an end to nights like these. Instead of the general hotel reviews found on sites like TripAdvisor, TripKick goes the extra mile, offering reviews on every individual room.
The site’s founders have spent the last year analyzing the individual rooms of over 250 hotels, mainly located in major metropolitan areas. This impressive feat was made possible by a trend in hotel architecture: hotel rooms typically vary within a floor, but are consistent moving vertically up a building (for example, room 105 and 205 would be the same, but 102 would differ).
Many rooms have been documented with an extreme level of detail, listing the size of the room, any possible noise concerns, and even the view a guest can expect from the balcony. Users can ask the site to recommend a room based on this criteria. Each hotel also receives an overall review, along with a listing of information such as the availability of WiFi. Visitors to the site are encouraged to leave their own reviews, and they can request for a hotel to be added to the database if it isn’t there already.
This all seems pretty useful, so why hasn’t it been done before? The reason is simple: there currently isn’t a way to book a particular room without calling the hotel and requesting it. Unlike airlines, which have computerized systems for seat selection, picking hotel rooms is still stuck in the dark ages of customer service. TripKick hopes that their site will spur the hotel industry to change its ways, but this could be a long ways off.
As it stands now, TripKick is going to be fighting an uphill battle. Traveling is exhausting enough as it is – many people will likely view this as just one more thing to deal with. And the site’s database of reviews is miniscule in comparison to giants like TripAdvisor. But for business travelers who frequently stay in hotels, the site could prove to be a handy resource in the ceaseless battle against noisy ice machines.