Location service

By N.B. | Washington, D.C.

A NEW survey of business travellers reveals what we want most in a hotel, and—no surprise—it's a great location. The survey, by the Choice Hotels chain, found that 73% of business travellers value location when selecting a hotel, with room value and free Wi-Fi coming in second and third, at 61% and 55% respectively.

The trouble is that figuring out which hotels have the best location is a tough process. How do you determine where a good spot is in an unfamiliar city? If you are just travelling for one meeting, it probably pays to be close to it. But what if you have meetings all over town? Or if you don't fancy staying in the central business district, where establishments are often expensive and book up early?

Air travellers already have RouteHappy, which attempts to quantify the "happiness" quotient of different flights, based on categories such as flight length, type of aircraft, service and customer satisfaction. But business travellers hunting for a room don't have any tool that is nearly as powerful. Sure, many review sites allow you to rank hotels by customers' subjective evaluations of their situations. But a "good location" means different things to different people. Some business travellers may value being close to good restaurants; others may want to be near major subway lines. (Not to mention that many online reviews are fake or paid-for.) If you are looking for a more quantitative evaluation of the quality of a hotel's surroundings—the equivalent of WalkScore, which measures a neighborhood's "walkability"—you are out of luck. You will just have to rely on word-of-mouth or TripAdvisor ratings.

Maybe it is time for another option. I would love to see a tool that allowed travellers to input an address and receive a ranking of location quality. I could see myself using such a service every time I was searching for somewhere to stay in an unfamiliar city.

One other note: if you really care about location and the hotels in the central business district are full or too expensive, consider AirBnB. Its location ratings have the same problem as everyone else's, but it is worth a shot until there is a better alternative.