Help Needed - Feedback for new Hotels Section

Hi All,

I'm about to upgrade the Hotels section on IndiaMike.com and I would love some feedback on the new look and feel and functionality.

I'd really appreciate it if you guys could play around with it, add some reviews, photos, etc. and let me know what you think about it. Post your thoughts in this thread.

NOTE: Any information you enter will be eventually overwritten, so don't put any "real" reviews in there. Just test stuff for now.

Thanks!

Here's the link: www.indiamike.com/india-hotels/

(Just had a load of database errors lasting about 3 minutes, seems OK now)

I clicked on the map, on Jaipur, then clicked 'Sort by User Rating' - the results were listed as follows.

Rating: 9 out of 10, based on 7 user reviews.
9.5 out of 10, based on 15 user reviews.
9.25 out of 10, based on 4 user reviews.
8.75 out of 10, based on 6 user reviews.
8 out of 10, based on 5 user reviews.
9.33 out of 10, based on 7 user reviews.
9 out of 10, based on 3 user reviews.
9 out of 10, based on 2 user reviews.
9 out of 10, based on 3 user reviews.
7.5 out of 10, based on 6 user reviews.

No order, and strangely, a 9 from 2 reviews comes both above and below a 9 from 3 reviews.

I then clicked on http://www.indiamike.com/india-hotel...-jaipur-h3622/ to find 2 adds by the owner, and no indication that this person was the owner.

Then clicked on http://www.indiamike.com/india-hotel...-jaipur-h3558/ and found info too crowded and confusing, had to read it a couple of times to realise that I was the person who submitted that review.

EDIT - Above 2 links didn't turn into the normal links. (with content detail)

No time to do further checks.

No time to submit any trial reviews at the moment, but some initial thoughts.

Didn't get any database or other errors.

This is MUCH more user-friendly in terms of searching via map, by State, town, etc. I'm guilty of not posting to the hotels area, as I hardly use it when looking for info - have always found it too fiddly to locate things, and this will make a big difference.

Like Steven, 'sort by rating' seems a bit random!

Would be good to be able to sort both ascending and descending for price and star rating. Plus nice to see a 'date of last review' against the hotel - if it was last reviewed in, say, 2005 it means the info is probably too far out of date to follow up.

Once you have called up a hotel and can see its description & the latest reviews there are some links that are showing the code rather than the link.

When looking at 'latest reviews' on that same screem:
- would it be possible to line up the member name with the top of the review
- could you add the actual score that member gave under their name (particularly high and low scores are always the most interesting, and its easier not to have to look at every review to find out who scored it how).

General thought - please could adding a hotel count as a review, rather than needing to come back and review it separately. There are currently hotels on which people have expressed strong opinions when they added them, but for which there are no actual reviews or scores.

Overall, looks much better. Will try to come back later and add some reviews/photos.

Good Day Nadreg,

Sorry to be a spoilt sport, but Personally I find
the Current Hotel Reviews Section(old)very user friendly & Helpfull.

Is there a Need For Change ?

rgds

vandy

First reaction is that its good. More like what you would expect nowdays. The style used is sort of the standard nowdays so people will feel comfortable navigating their way round.

Hope the reviews can be controlled such that fake reviewers are not able to bump up a rating etc.

We hope so too!

It is tough to control, but we will try

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'll go over them in detail and respond later today.

There were a few reasons for the upcoming change:
1. The interface for the current hotels system categorizes the hotels by their parent state, but not by their city. So, if you want to see hotels for Agra, for example, you need to look at all the hotels for UP and manually filter through the listings.
2. You cannot currently sort hotel listings by Price or by Star Rating. Infact, the current system does not have Star Rating as a value for the hotel.
3. Navigation to find hotels is lacking. For example, if you want to find a hotel by name, you have to be in that hotel's State page for the search to work. This led to a lot of duplicate hotels because people couldn't locate the original entry. It also turned off a lot of people who wanted to enter new hotels/reviews but couldn't figure out how to do it.
4. The new code also allows me to import hotels easily. I've gotten a whole list of government approved hotels from one of the agencies that I have imported into the application, which bumps up the total listings by 2000+ hotels. The new hotels have star ratings, prices, addresses, phone numbers, etc.

There are still some formatting and logic issues that I need to sort through, stuff that Steven and Sue have pointed out. I'm confident that it will be a much better interface once we get that stuff nailed down.

I would put the most recent reviews first. as a traveler, I want to see the newest, up to the minute reviews first, not scroll through a list of old, outdated reviews. a review older than a year means nothing to me, but that's me.

someone might see the older favorable reviews first and think hey, this place sounds great, and not even bother searching down the list where some unfavorable reviews might be, then get to the hotel and be unpleasantly surprised.

I think its most of us! We are all familiar with the sounded-wonderful-in-the-guide-book-but-it-was-a-dump stories.

Just added my first review. Very easy to use, though some of the 'reviews' seem to be general comments about web sites etc?

As an overpaid expense account ex-pat I'll be mainly adding reviews for business hotels, but I've also stayed in some very interesting places in some of the more remote locations where, horror of horrors, there's no mini bar!

A reminder that this is still a test system just for testing out the functionality. Looking forward to your reviews, luxury and budget, when it goes live

I'd suggest sections for related countries- Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, as many IM travelers go to or come from them

On the date issue and in keeping with some of the above, I'd suggest having it very clear when the original entry was made. It currently isn't I think, or it's hard to find (later comments are dated though, which is of course handy); but I can't say I use the hotels section a lot, so I may well be overlooking something.

I imagine it is wide open to random bumping and stuff, but I can't think of a way to prevent it either. It comes with the field I guess, and it has been so for the existing hotels section I think. Maybe have a clear disclaimer on top to keep your jar of salt at the ready. SueJ's suggestion to have it clear who did the bumping/gave what rating is also good, it's like that in the Photo Galleries as well.

The pages and layout look nice enough I think, probably a lot more user-friendly yes.

If there's a way to add a new hotel I didn't find it,

Also I suggest all reviews be required to give dates of stay (aproximate is ok - let's say monty & year of stay) -- this more important than date of review, sometimes I am sure new people will write a review of a stay some time back.

Fixed.

That's going to be difficult for me to programatically remove. I'm going to try and go through these and weed them out as much as possible, but if the members see something "fishy" please let the mods know.

Fixed! The hotel descriptions should read better now. Cleaner. The URLs to the hotels have been changed as well.