Over the last few months, we’ve outlined a handful of opportunities with the Hotel Finder user experience. In that time, things have continued to improve: a more responsive UI, better tools for users, and lots of tests around the content to display to users. In that time, Hotel Finder has also gotten better at dealing with attraction or location-based search queries.

We first commented on this issue when observing real Hotel Finder users interact with the site. Part of the task we gave them was to find a hotel near a major landmark, something they had some difficulty with. Over the last few weeks though, we’ve noticed some marked improvement in this experience.

While there’s still lots of opportunity to improve this facet of Hotel Finder, check out this subtle change in the results:

In the example above, we’ve searched for a hotel near one of the best barbecue joints in Fort Worth, Cooper’s BBQ. There are two things here worth pointing out:

1. In the map, note the large green place marker. That’s Coopers!
2. Highlighted in blue dashed boxes, Hotel Finder is now showing the distance from the location we’ve searched on.

The team at Koddi actually had a chance to use these features last week when booking a hotel for an upcoming business trip. We see these updates as steps in the right directions for users, enabling them to get more use out of Hotel Finder when planning their hotel stay.

A couple of things might still be missing, though. We’ve found that in situations where your search query returns a lot of results, the lack of filter functionality really limits the usefulness of this distance data. Though you can sort the results by distance, we believe a filter would be a win for users here so that they could reduce the total number of hotels displayed to their parameters. Additionally, the current implementation requires the user to intuit what is happening, as there isn’t much in the way of feedback to let them know what the green marker and distance data actually is.

What else do you think could be improved about this experience?