Mercure Hotels Hides the Wifi Link

I spend a fair bit of my time in hotels and therefore have to work using the provided hotel wi-fi services. I'm very grateful for this (usually) free service and it has been a factor in my hotel selection in the past (although most now provide it, including a number of Bed & Breakfast establishments).

However I thought it worth pointing out the poor usability of the Mercure Hotel group's wi-fi link on it's page... can you spot it on the screen grab from my high specification laptop??

Nope, it's not the purple title that says "Free WiFi" or the purple text underneath it that says "Free WiFi - ideal for basic browsing and emailing". But the button beneath it that is lost on my screen... and therefore must be the same for other users.

Hilton website shows failed users the door

When using the Hilton hotel website tonight, I had a problem. After entering all my details I waited for several minutes while a spinning icon continued to do nothing. Try as I might, the site wouldn't accept the booking for myself and colleague on our forthcoming room  our overnight business trip.

Instead, and after what seemed like a long wait (although it may have been only a few minutes), I was given the image below:

To some users, this may seem like a well-designed error page, something that shows that Hilton cares about such eventualities. But for me, this wasn't the message I took away. Instead all I saw was a closed door with the handle down and the online equivalent of a 'do not disturb' sign hanging there.

Was this really the message Hilton wants to give users who have already had poor site experience?

Google Hotel Finder pushes results off the screen

Last week I had a quick outburst at Google for managing to take up most of my screen real estate with adverts. This previous posting was based upon a search for car insurance, which left only one organic search result on my 1366 x 768 laptop screen.

So, with the dark launching of Google's Hotel Finder application yesterday to much of the UK's searching traffic, I was keen to try it out. The subject of this particular functionality will probably be discussed in a later post, but for now I couldn't get past one obvious fact...

... that Google's new hotel search tool takes up a lot of space on the page. 

Just take the screen shot above as an obvious example. Here, following a search for "hotel in glasgow" I get a page displaying: pay-per-click adverts, a map showing the location of some hotels in Scotland's fair city and now the sponsored zone that allows me to enter my required date range and 4 price-based links.

But a quick image edit later, you can see what this page looks like if you remove all the adverts.

And this is being gracious, considering the map is a link to another page that has several PPC links in pole position on the page.

So, well done Google, for managing to completely push all organic results off of the screen of my pretty high-specification laptop. Are you trying to do away with the search engine optimisation industry entirely?

Aggregator Maturity

Recently I've been posting my thoughts on the online aggregation services, including the more mathematical Herfindahl Index.Last month I was attempting to explain to someone how aggregation got more technically complex as the product or service became more complex and I quickly drew out a table that explained it. So now I have put it up online to shame and to get feedback.Aggregator Maturity

View more PowerPoint from Hayden Sutherland

As always, I see this as 'work in progress' and never a definitive completed concept.