Launching a New Website

I’ve been pretty quiet today, because we just launched the new travel site here at PriceGrabber. As you can imagine, it’s been a busy day making sure it all works and trying to get in touch with our partners.

I usually refrain from talking about work here, but I’m going to do it today because we have some pretty cool stuff in this version . . .

• Flight Amenities – We are the FIRST website to introduce flight amenity information into the travel purchase/comparison process. You can now find legroom information, inflight entertainment (i.e. live TV versus an overhead screen, etc.), and powerport availability in addition to the on time performance we’ve been providing for the past year.
• Hotel Name Search – Finding specific hotels has become much easier now that you can type in all or part of a name and have it instantly filtered to the top.
• Hotel Reviews – Now in addition to finding expert hotel ratings, you can see what other travelers are saying about specific hotels. Find out strengths and weaknesses as well as overall thoughts on hotels. Leave your own ratings each time you stay somewhere. (For an example, see the Sheraton Petaluma.
• Faster, Cleaner, Easier to Use – This is the overall theme of the new launch. Through the use of AJAX, the site now runs faster and you can start filtering and sorting as soon as the first results appear.

Of course, there will be a few bugs to work through. If you find any, send them my way. Oh, and if you need more reason to go try it out, you can enter a sweepstakes while you’re there to win a trip to Alaska, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands.

Now back to our regularly scheduled airline dorkiness.