Hotelly.com, a website combining price comparison technology with videos of hotels and reviews, is to be trialled from this week.
The site, scheduled to go live to consumers in January, has been developed by travel technology specialist RateGain.
Hotelly is based on a pay-per-click model and has already signed up about 36 companies including Gullivers Travel Associates, LateRooms and HotelClub to provide accommodation to the service.
The site has been developed to offer consumers a more rounded service bringing together user-generated reviews, video clips and price comparison.
Technology within the site includes a ValueFinder tool enabling customers to narrow down their search based on a number of criteria including price, location and star rating.
The holiday packaging side of Hotelly is being run by On Holiday Group, which is also providing its Fresh TV video clips to the site.
Announcing the launch at World Travel Market, On Holiday Group chief executive Steve Endacott said: “The quality of clicks I’m going to get is going to be better than what’s already out there.”
OHG will use its existing flight search and bed-bank platform to provide the flight and hotel packaging element for Hotelly. The plan is to rank accommodation suppliers initially on their customer service and how long it takes them to answer the phone.
However, over a period of time, the website will gather consumer feedback on the overall service from providers and rank them accordingly.
RateGain already offers the travel and hospitality industry four business-to-business products including its SearchView technology, enabling companies to track their position online compared with competitors and NetReport price comparison tool, already used by On Holiday Group across its retail sites.
* More WTM 2008 coverage at travelweekly.co.uk/wtm2008