Busy few weeks for Cheapflights Media ending with the simultaneous launch of hotel search in three countries for its fledgling metasearch engine Zugu.
The addition of hotel channels on its UK, Germany and US sites comes just ten days after the existing flight-focused Zugu was released in the US for the first time.
The UK version has also added car hire search this week.
Cheapflights says it has used third party providers for the hotel and car hire search on the system, rather than build the metasearch technology itself as it did with flights.
Although unconfirmed, Zugu hotel search appears to be powered by Hotelscombined on all three country sites, similar to the hotel channel partnership on rival metasearch site Skyscanner.
The hotel search channel allows users to filter by price, type, location, facilities, star-rating and brand. A map search tool is also included.
It is unclear which organisation is powering the car hire search. Cheapflights also declined to disclose any details about the partnership.
Zugu launched in the UK in the February 2010, followed by a quick roll-out in March to Germany.
Very Fast deployment of third party API’s which gives lots of seo content and down stream on global basis. Well done – that’s good.
Though apart from that, void of any innovation, as far as I can see, especially on car hire! I.e. The lowest common denominator (seo/downstream) is being targeted as opposed to a targeted user.
Though I guess being diiferent and challenging the status quo is not the objective on this project. (which seems to be pretty widespread these days in flights, hotels and cars
(bring on google or at least someone prepared to take a risk by being different)
Steve