GetGoing Adds Hotels to its Discount Flight-Finding Platform

GetGoing Adds Hotels to its Discount Flight-Finding Platform

By

Besides quickly finding discounted flights, travelers using the online travel startup GetGoing can now book hotels as well.


That’s through a new partnership with the Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN), which brings over 140,000 hotels worldwide into the personalized travel booking site’s platform.

During the four months since it emerged out of beta with its “Pick Two, Get One” airline booking system, GetGoing’s customers have been “clamoring” for a hotel option as well, says the company’s executive team.

“One of the things a lot of our customers and also our airline partners asked for was the hotel feature,” says CEO Alek Vernitsky. “They asked that we make it as easy to use as the airline product; that we create a one-stop shop.”

The hotel feature has some useful integrations – weather information from Weather Underground, and socially relevant information, like which of your friends live in that city or have visited there recently.

You can conduct your hotel search by city or region, but also down to the neighborhood level, or by landmark, through integrations with Google Places, and other sources.

You also can set filters that include price, star ratings (via EAN), and TripAdvisor (crowd-sourced) ratings.

GetGoing has also established a simple, intuitive rewards program called GoRewards – for every ten nights booked, you get one night free, at up to the average price paid for those previous ten nights.

What particularly struck me during a demo of the new service was how quickly the pages loaded during a search.

Vernitsky explained this is due to some under-the-hood choices:

“Hotel pricing information is dynamic so we have to query that constantly. But the basic hotel information changes very infrequently, so we store all of that on our servers. We also look for any updates to that basic data at nights when our traffic is lower. The overall results mean very fast load times.”

Since we last covered GetGoing at 7x7, the startup has added a FlightFinder feature that allows it to compete more directly with Priceline and Kayak.

The SoMa-based team of 45 is currently working on further enhancements of the hotel feature that may be ready as soon as September.

Related Articles
Now Playing at SF Symphony
View this profile on Instagram

7x7 (@7x7bayarea) • Instagram photos and videos

Neighborhoods
From Our Partners