Hotel Reservations from Hotelreservations.com

Making hotel reservations online for traveling is becoming more and more common as ecommerce becomes an everyday part of our lives. In 2005, online travel was projected to be around 65 Billion dollar industry, so I am sure it is well over 70 billion by now. Lizzy makes reservations online at a number of other hotel reservation sites, and usually ends up going with what ever site has the better deal. However, with the guarantee of a 100 dollar rebate, it seems like HotelReservation.com is making an attempt to persuade us online travel shoppers to come and use their travel site.
With Hotelreservations.com you can save up to 70% off of your reservations and then there is also the $100 rebate if you make a reservation on the Internet. Potentially getting money back if you find an online reservation cheaper at anther site is pretty cool. However some conditions do apply, so make sure you read the small print. But hey, 100 bucks is a hundred bucks, so you might as well give it a try. I am sure that if the site does not do as it says, it won't be around for long.
In addition to making reservations for hotels, flights, cars, vacation rentals or combination vacation packages, many other options are available. Just searching through the site gives me some ideas for future trips. I particularly like the bed and breakfast section...some of those bed and breakfasts sound too cool. Another groovy feature of the site is the destination guides which they may not have for every city, but it appears that many are, and it seems like more are being added all the time.
So I took the search bar for a ride and typed in Philadelphia for New Years eve. The hotel reservations that were available included accommodations from $59- $350, with a few of the places that Lizzy and I have stayed at being discounted more than when we had stayed there. Well I don't do the reservations for our travels, Lizzy does that, but if it is cheaper she will use it. However, HotelReservations.com does not have an affiliate program, so we would more than likely check our affiliate partners first, and then we would do a comparison. I will remind her when making our next reservations to use the Hotelreservation.com site as one of the comparison sites.

Critiquing the site from a webmaster stand point, with an SEO Skew, the site does need some work to be competitive. The site is currently nowhere in the SERP's for the search term "hotel reservations" for which they want to be found. But it can be found for its name and for I am assuming its owners name. For example, Title tags need quite a bit of work, (Hotel reservations is in the title tag on the home page) the site name is used in them way too much. That's fine if you want to rank for HotelReservations.com or Barry Sowder, but it would seem that they would have their keywords in the front of the title on all of their pages, not just the home page. Far to valuable SEO real estate to be wasted on the site name or the owners name. Also, for wanting to rank for the search term "Hotel reservations", the site should have internal links with this as the link text, even perhaps in the top navigation. And were is the site map to be found? Optimize that site better for a better ROI. tsk tsk. Your SEO company must be slacking.

One last thing, if you have a blog, you may also be able to participate in a paid program they have for reviewing their site, which seems to be a really unique opportunity for bloggers. This site is not eligible for it because this post is a paid for advertisement.