When searching for a hotel, there are many different ways users can search:

• They can search for a specific hotel or brand name
• They can search for hotels in a city and narrow down by price and amenities
• They can search for a hotel closest to an attraction

When traveling to a new location for vacation, people often search for hotels close to the popular tourist attractions. For example, I will be traveling to Athens this summer. I have never been there, and I want to find a hotel in a safe area. While I don’t have a specific hotel in mind, I would like to stay at one near the Panathenaic Stadium.  So how do the big four metasearch sites (Google Hotel Ads, TripAdvisor, Trivago, and Kayak) compare when searching for a hotel by proximity? In what ways do the map products differ? Let’s continue with this example and find out!

Google Hotel Ads

Starting on the Google homepage, I was able to search “hotels in Athens by Panathenaic Stadium”. This pulled up the traditional web search with the Google Hotel Ads callout. When I adjusted my dates to the desired timeframe, I was redirected to the mapresults page. This is where I ran into some problems.

I could not find Panathenaic Stadium on the map.  Also, Google mapresults does not provide the option to sort or filter by distance.  In order to find it on the map, I had to do a separate Google Maps search for “Panathenaic Stadium”.  That is when I realized the stadium has two names: Panathenaic Stadium and Kallimarmaro.  Google knew this and was able to complete my search but it did not make this distinction on the map, so I would not have recognized the Greek name without performing a separate search.

Once I found it on the map, I manually zoomed in to find the closest hotel to the stadium–Pi Athens, which was not one of the original properties listed when I was first directed to the page.  If I had not manually zoomed in further, I would have assumed Zappion Hotel was the closest.

In the end, I was able to find the closest hotel to the stadium with the addition of a few extra steps. It helped that I’m well acquainted with Google Maps, so it’s possible the search process would have looked different for someone who doesn’t use Google’s map features on a daily basis.

TripAdvisor

When I searched “Panathenaic Stadium” on the TripAdvisor homepage, it returned the attraction page for the actual stadium. In order to search for hotels near the stadium, I had to first search “hotel in Athens” and then apply filters to narrow down the results.

This wasn’t much of a problem as the filters were easy to find on the left sidebar.  I was able to search for hotels within 0.5 miles of Panathenaic Stadium.  TripAdvisor also provides the option to sort the results by distance, making the closest hotels appear at the top of the results list.

To ensure that the hotel provided was actually near the stadium, I then clicked on the “View map” button.  Unlike Google, TripAdvisor places an orange marker on the location of interest, making it effortless to find the stadium.  From there, I quickly zoomed in to find the Pi Athens hotel.

Trivago

With Trivago, I was able to simply search “Panathenaic Stadium” and only hotels near that location appeared in results. Additionally, the “Distance from” filter was automatically set to 10 miles within Panathenaic Stadium.  All I had to do was adjust the slider from 10 miles to 0.5 miles to see the closest hotels.

Similar to TripAdvisor, Trivago provides users the option to “Sort by Distance” as well as “Focus on Distance”.  This was the first metasearch site to accurately show Pi Athens as the closest hotel without manually searching the map.

When I clicked on “Go to map,” I noticed a blue sports icon indicating where the stadium sits and the added bonus of a heat map.  This reassured me that I was not choosing a hotel in a deserted part of Athens.  Also, all hotels pins appeared on the map with a daily rate and a color-coded emoticon rating.

Kayak

My Kayak search was very similar to TripAdvisor where I had to search for “Athens, Greece” and then refine the results with the filters on the left side of the screen.  The main difference was that I was able to filter down even more precisely to 0.25 miles.  When I applied this filter and sorted by distance, Pi Athens appear as the first result.

Clicking on “Go to Map View” pulled up a heat map complete with a black icon on the stadium.  Nearby hotels were highlighted with an orange dot. When I scrolled over the closest dot, it was indeed, the Pi Athens hotel.

In summary, all four of the metasearch engines led me to the hotel closest to Panathenaic Stadium. In this particular example, Trivago provided the most frictionless experience, finding the closest hotel to my location in the least amount of steps.

Each of the metasearch platforms has its own advantages and the search experience for a hotel will depend largely on the search terms you use and the factors that are most important to you, such as price, ratings, amenities, or in my case–location. It’s all a matter of personal preference and what you are looking for on a given day. Between these four sites, you can’t really go wrong.