DealRank™, Similar and Nearby Hotels and Deals, and "Interesting" Deals

Over the last couple weeks, we've built some cool new features on DealBase.com. Three in particular...

Interesting Deals Pages

This is fairly simple, but one of my favorites. There is a list of these pages on the home page in the right hand column, under "Interesting Deals". You can find the cheapest deals, the best deals at 5 star hotels, and so on. But, my favorite to check out is the Most Expensive Deals page. This is where we list the most expensive hotel packages, and you can get a glimpse of what the uber-rich might plunk down for. Deals currently as as much as $110,000/night, yes per night. But go take a look and check out what those deals include. Things like private jet for transportation, $40,000 in jewelry, and so on. Oh, how about it includes a trip to Russia, and you know, to make it extra cute, a "Presidential Puppy"! Crazy.

This page is just a lot of fun to explore and see what some of the hotel's come up with.

DealRank™

DealRank™ is our new way of ranking deals to show you the best value. This is an algorithmic/mathematical determination based on various criteria for deals. It factors in the nightly rate, percentage savings, and various other aspects. We expect this to be one of the best ways to sort deals and help you evaluate what is truly a great deal. Each person looking at hotels has different reasons and criteria for evaluating deals. Some want the absolutely best price, some want the best overall value, some are looking to get the biggest savings, or the most extras thrown in, and so on. DealRank™ should help provide a more holistic view on this. We've done a lot of testing and tweaking here, and will continue to do so as the site evolves, but I am pretty darn happy with the results so far. We still have many other ways to sort deals (see the sort menu in the upper right of any deal listing page), but this is our new default.

Check this out on say the New York City hotel deals page, where previously the most economical deals didn't always rise to the top (percentage savings wise, NYC tends to have the best deals at more expensive hotels).

Similar and Nearby Hotels and Deals

Another quite useful feature is the list of similar and nearby hotels or deals (depends on the what kind of page you're on) listing at the bottom of some pages. This factors in various criteria, but one thing for sure is that all of the listed hotels/deals are always within a 50 mile radius. I personally used this when looking for deals on a trip I took the other weekend.

An example is similar and nearby hotels on, one of my favorites, the W hotel in Seattle. Amazon put me up in this hotel. If you've never stayed at a W, they're pretty cool. While working for Adobe for many years, I stayed at the Fairmont Seattle a ton, and you'll see that listed as the second hotel in the list of nearby hotels. But, the W is more edgy, they tend to have cool bars, upscale, swank rooms, etc. Seattle is a favorite place of mine to travel to.

I'm working on a particularly cool feature right now, that I can't wait to get out there. Will take a bit longer as we want to get the UI right and make it of utmost use, but I think it will be something of great value to everyone. Stay tuned.