[The sorting functionality exists in Windows 8.1 release preview]
Users of the Travel by now know that they can search hotels for thousands of locations in the planet. They can do it from various markets and various flavors of the OS. The results you get are fast, sorted with various first hand data that you will ever need.
I will cover all possible methods to approach hotel search in the app in a later post but this being a good start on the app I felt more value addition goes toward showing the really cool features of the app that will keep you thinking what else exists.
This is how the Hotel search form looks like
Studies have actually shown that users are good to go with the above set of information and booking a tickets. Users today have yet to migrate to using Mobile devices for completing the final booking or putting their credit card numbers. My understanding is this --- These Windows 8 powered tablets are still your full blown power devices on which you could write entire Data Center logics or create a WinCE project and at the same time use the power and luxury of a Tablet interface that are touch friendly. As absolute first time users the change was not comfortable but then very quickly it gets on to you. I was blended into the tablet mindset within 15 days of using when I realized that if computing and power it provides has to come along a long way from being a heavy device on your desk to a companion then it needs to let go of the dependencies on a keyboard a mouse and all the comet trail that comes with it.
Coming to the point ( see my ADD kicking in all the time ) . So now I was searching for a hotel in Punta Cana ( a super exotic place ) and you may think ‘ The OS will show me some of the premium hotels or well known hotels in the place). You may have to do multiple iterations of searches on this. The search result page is a scrollable list of hotels as you can see in the image below
The fields that you see are the price, the Star rating of the hotel , the trip advisor rating with the review numbers and the amenities listed then and there. The results come aggregated from multiple providers with the base price being an internal algo result . This is not the end of the story, you can start typing on this page { example , some one told you that there is a hotel on this particular street; but you cannot remember it clearly as of now ). You start typing the name of the street and the results will automatically get filtered around it.
What happens when you tap on any of the results –> Will cover that in another post.