Last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight is adding a new feature to its iOS app Wednesday: the ability to add your own photos.
If you're not familiar with the service, HotelTonight is a mobile app that helps users find discounted hotel rooms near them at the last minute. Now available in 100 destinations around the world (including 12 different counties), the app displays three hotel options for a particular area (rotated daily), each labeled by the type of experience you're likely to have there. For instance, a hotel might be labeled "Charming," "Hip," or "Basic."
Hotels are added to the app each day at noon, and are available for users to book until 2 a.m., long after other discount hotel services have closed their doors.
HotelTonight hand-picked each of the 2,500+ hotels it where it offers stays. Each hotel listing includes not only basic hotel information, but information on why they like it, what you need to know before you book a room, and a handful of professional photos of what's in store when you get there.
Starting Wednesday those hotel listings are going to include a little something extra: pictures taken by HotelTonight guests of the hotels. After a user books a hotel through the app they'll be given a photo scavenger hunt of sorts that they can complete during their stay: 6 pictures of locations around the hotel such as their room, bathroom, view and the hotel bar.
"I've been really impressed with some of the photography I've seen our customers doing," Sam Shank Co-founder and CEO of HotelTonight told Mashable. "Often the photos are just more interesting because they're at the hotel for a lot longer. They're there for sunset, they're there for the bagpipes…whatever might happen at the hotel that's fun and interesting. It's like having a photographer there for 24 hours"
After you snap a shot, a built-in photo editor within the lets you adjust your finished photo to get the best quality. A dimmer feature, for instance, helps brighten up photos taken in darker area. The editor doesn't include filters like you find in other apps, however.
"We want it to look like the photo was taken in the hotel, not in 1977," says Shank. "We want it to be very representative of the hotel."
Called "Snap Your Stay," HotelTonight is rewarding customers who choose to participate with $5 in credits for each completed photo set, and $10 in credits for images that get selected as a high-quality photo by others in the community and the HotelTonight staff, a criteria that will be measured primarily by the number of "likes" it receives. The company also plans to put out a digital coffee table book.
Photos can also be shared out by guests with friends on Twitter and Facebook.
In addition to adding support for customer photos, HotelTonight also added a price guarantee to its app Wednesday. Now if you find a better rate for the same hotel on a given night the service will match that price.
Ready to give it a try? You can download the updated version of HotelTonight for the iPhone from the App Store now. An iPad an Android version are on the way, and will be released at a later date.
Images courtesy of HotelTonight
Source: Mashable
