Important Note: When being asked to review a website, paid or not, I treat it as though I’ve just come across the site on Google and then give my opinion from there. Price tags do not, by any means, sway my opinion on a sponsored entry. This is something I would like for the sponsor to keep in mind. Through me, you will receive my 100% honest opinion on your product and I remind you that this is what you’ve asked for.
This review is for inasra.com. They are a provider of information in regards to hotels in India.
When I think of a site that I can use to learn about hotels, I’d typically travel to the more well known ones because they tend to cover everything. It IS nice to come across a site that will give you nothing more than hotels in the country you specify. I do believe, however, that those traveling around that area aren’t going to be able to come across this site very easily from Google. I ran a search for it with simple keywords looking exactly for hotels in India. and the site didn’t even show up in the search results. I understand that by having bloggers write about it you may be able to get your name out there a bit more but I do suggest doing a serious SEO overhaul of your template so it’s keyword heavy for search engines. I easily found over 100 other sites in dedication to India based hotels but this won’t help your cause later on down the road if you want to be as easily remembered as sites like hotels.com, travelocity.com, and even asiahotels.com as well.
The template itself is a little bland, this is coming from a design stand point, simplicity is great but if you wish to stand out amongst the rest, you need to make the needle stand out from the haystack, so to speak. While you offer India specific hotels for users to search through, you don’t give me anything different than sites that cover hotels all over the world. You need to visually hold someone’s attention there for more than just the search. The more return visits you have to your site obviously means better business, better business is more money/fame and it builds up from there.
I did a quick search with the default queries that you provide on the site, I personally know nothing about India so I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for a hotel room. I will say that I find it rather interesting that room rates start in the US$9.00 range per night. I live in a heavy tourist area and even during off season a lot of the rooms are in the US$50.00 range, which is relatively cheap but these same hotels are in the US$150.00 per night range now. I do like the display you have for the database itself, this is the color I was looking for on what I consider to be a somewhat bland site. I also like how you note if you’re affiliated with the hotel or not through red or green icons. I’m on a 1024×768 browser, however, and I have a scroll bar along the bottom of the page. I would personally say you should change the size of the frame everything is loading in to not be as wide as it is, but again this is strictly from a designers stand point.
As far as working with newer web technology is concerned, the ajax features on the site are very interesting to see on a hotel based website, note that this isn’t a bad thing it’s just something I haven’t seen before. Naturally this would be one thing closer to you standing out amongst the rest, I just think having something that advanced throughout the rest of the site would benefit your site.
I do have a question for you, if you’d like to email girl@krissy.nu to answer it for me that would be great. You note that you have 35,000 hotel rooms at amazing rates ranging from US$5 to US$10,000. Should I assume that the $5 per night rooms are in a relatively, bad, area? Again, I know little to nothing about India, but I do know there is quite a bit of poverty there. The US$5.00 per night rooms, wouldn’t it be kind of “bad business” to book a penny-pincher (so to speak) in a run-down, potentially dangerous, area?
All in all, you’ve got a good thing going here, I just think little improvements here and there could really help your site go the extra mile it needs to get into the main stream of hotel related websites. I hope this review did not offend, hurt or bother you in any way because again, you requested honesty. I hope these suggestions can help you to improve. I will say this though, if more than one person has given any of the suggestions I’ve listed above, regular visitors who aren’t being asked to review your website will more than likely have the same opinion.