14 DAY TRIAL // Google has updated its Hotel Finder tool which, well, helps you find hotels. It's a search tool that integrates Google Maps to offer you a simple way of discovering hotels that you may like in the area that you want.
Now, Google is making it even easier to do that by adding an option to search for hotels within walking or public transport distance of a landmark you definitely have to see or the place you're going there to visit or do business.
"Last year we introduced Hotel Finder, an experimental tool to help you find hotels, and today, we’ve extended its functionality with a new way to search: ‘Hotels by Travel Time'," Konrad Gianno, software engineer at Google, wrote.
"Now if you go to Hotel Finder and enter [Empire State Building] in the search box, you’ll see the hotels that you can get to by public transport within 20 minutes," he added.
All the hotels that fit the criteria will be highlighted on the map. What's more, you can change some of the parameters, for example, you can extend the travel time, or choose walking distance rather than public transport. You can also change the location you want to visit in the search results page.
There's another new way of finding hotels, you can actually define the area on the map where you would want the hotels to be located in. Google then highlights all hotels in the area.
Another option is to pick your hotel by highlighting the city's most popular locations and showing the hotels around them.
That said, the tool is still experimental and not all the features work everywhere, it depends on the type of data Google has access to.
"To try it out, simply go to Hotel Finder, search for a city or a point of interest and select 'Hotels by travel time'. Keep in mind that Hotel Finder and 'Hotels by travel time' are experimental and filtering by transit time is only available in cities where we have partnered with local transit agencies to integrate their data into Google Maps," Google explained.