Yapta.com, an online travel website that tracks airline ticket prices for travelers has added a hotel price tracking service that will help consumers monitor and compare pricing for 110,000 national and international hotels. Basically, Yapta lets consumers choose a hotel that best suits their travel needs and then sign up to be automatically alerted if and when the price drops for a particular stay.
Yapta has included several useful features to help consumers track hotel prices. First, the site will collect the lowest published rate of a tracked hotel and will create a graph that visually demonstrates the price of the hotel over time. Users can also track multiple hotels at once and compare pricing. Alerts can be customized by drop in price or by the frequency of alerts received. And like many travel sites, users can search for hotels by filters, including star rating, price, and amenities.
Yapta previously focused only on airfare flight tracking, where you can track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines. Similar to the hotel feature, Yapta allows users to select flights to track, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. (Read our original review here).
The key functionality for Yapta is the tracking feature-it’s definitely a useful and easy way to compare travel prices without the hassle of having to constantly monitor changes in hotel and flight prices. Microsoft’s Farecast forecasts flight and hotel prices and then evaluates if the given price is a deal based on past fare history, but the site doesn’t actually track flights and hotels for you. Originally a browser add-on, Yapta became a website last year and is steadily growing in popularity (the site now has 600,000 registered users compared to 350,000 users in June of 2008). This new feature should be appealing to anyone looking for a travel deal, which is basically the entire world right now.
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farecast “doesn’t actually track flights”
not true. farecast tracks flights via email and rss:
rss: http://farecast.../syndication.do
email: https://farecas...myFareAlerts.do
keep up the good work, yapta.
Great article
Wow this is interesting . Keep up the good work, yapta. Good to hear company is doing well.
I wonder if this could help stop another 9/11. In that context, I think some of this technology is actually promising. Although let’s always keep in mind Neil Postman’s warnings about technopoly.
NS
Yapta is a very good kind of website offering such service. This is my first time to know about it. Expanding their services would really make them better!
its great
I think they only have “live database around US and I think it will take years for me to get the deal become my benefit since I really drop my back rest at the USA,hope they expand to Asia,there I could give them better review then this
never heard of this site before, nice feature
http://onhit.net
It is one of the most novel and innovative sites in the Web 2.0 arena. I think it has a very bright future.
Looks like this alert service space is heating up. Our web site ShoppingNotes.com does exactly the same thing–tracking price drops–for any products from any shopping sites. Check it out!
Farecast actually does flight tracking for you. I get emails or RSS updates from them when I want to set up trip I am shopping around for. Does Yapta do something else that Farecast doesn’t do?
Great service for sure, but they need to stop sending me price changes after the flight has already departed.
Interesting idea that seems pretty useful
Nice post! Check out my site as well at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
I don’t know this.. but it’s my pleasure to know about this great job!