From the Store description:
Book last minute hotel rooms (for up to 5 nights!) at killer rates. We make your decision super easy by showing you the day’s best hotels & values.
- Need an excuse to stay & play another day?
- A place to crash after wine tasting?
- A cooler way to do biz travel?
- A way to take date night up to eleven?
- An (ahem) escape from the in-laws?
We got you.
It's an appealing pitch. As someone who travelled recently on a pre-booked (months in advance) hotel-based holiday, I came to realise that it can be stressful and constraining having to conform to a schedule cooked up well in advance. Why not 'wing it' and look for hotels in an area when you're in that area and with no time pressures? It's an appealing thought.
Here's the feature list for Hotel Tonight on Windows Phone:
Stellar last minute prices
Book stays of up to 5 nights
Ever-growing list of cities and countries
Curated selection of hotels to make your choice easy
Top-rated hotels: we only work with places where we’d want to stay, too
Super easy to book a room (book in 10 seconds – just 3 taps and a swipe!)
Book from 9am until 2am, every day
24/7 customer support (with real, live, nice people)
See ratings from fellow bookers
Best rate guarantee
Supported destinations at the moment include North America, Central America, South America and Europe.
I took Hotel Tonight for a spin, armed with a knowledge of hotels in Paris in 2014 (hey, makes me sound like a seasoned traveller - ahem!):
A plush start leads to a rather clever countdown to the availability of 'today's' best deals. The only thing is that if you let your screen go to sleep, the timer gets divorced from real time and you end up having to kill Hotel Tonight from the multitasking carousel.
Ah - deals are now available - except that they're not that much of a deal, if I'm honest. As 'last minute' rooms, I'd expect 50% discounts or thereabouts. Hmm..... (right) the list of supported cities is very small, internationally - and yes, I did try the search tool. My local city (Reading) wasn't listed at all.
Looking to Paris then, here are the suggested options (less than a dozen of them - I said this was somewhat exclusive!), all quite pricey. (right) Tapping through gives basic details, links to more info, booking, a map and background photos. Mind you, "Solid" as a rating? 'SOLID'? I think I'd be looking for something more illustrious for £261 a night - and that's the OFFER price!
The map view shows how few hotels are in the Hotel Tonight scheme/database - here (right) is the official explanation. More likely, most hotels don't want to pay the fee/comission to get into the database in the first place. Certainly the cheaper hotels don't, it seems.
The full-screen photos are pretty in the usual brochure way, with long lists of relevant details - there's no faulting the presentation or application itself.
Nine out of ten for the Hotel Tonight application then, but the content itself proved too sparse and too exclusive. But that's a service level thing and maybe HT will improve in the coming year?