On our way to the Ultimate Travel App: 2 UPDATES coming

We’re leaving the stage of being only the “browser extension that compares hotel prices.” We’re moving closer to our ultimate travel app goal, and we just launched our RatePunk Cashback system. It seems to be working well, we just have quite a few technical things to update (you can find more details about it in my latest post here).

Here you’ll find more about 2 other updates we’re working on now and hope to launch at the beginning of 2023.

✅ REVIEW AGGREGATION

You could notice we have a thing for COMPARING things. If, at first, we were only comparing the prices, this feature will also compare review rates. The struggle here: the difference in hotel ratings on different websites. You want to book a hotel but… Tripadvisor says 9.5, Booking is pretty sure it’s 7, and on Expedia, you see a 6. I guess it would be easier to see them all in one place & instantly get the overall rating. And that’s our purpose with it. With further updates, the possibility to see what for it’s given a certain rating and to personalize the shown reviews will also be available (for example, it’s rated a 9.5 for WI-FI, so it’s perfect for digital nomads, etc.)

Our system will get feedback data from all major online agencies and show them to the user, creating a new RatePunk Badge with the most accurate rating.

We're also planning to do a so-called Word Cloud, where the most popular feedback comments will be included. However, that's for the long run - to do this, we need to scrape a lot of data.

✅ REBOOKING

This one already has a simple example in the flight industry. If you’re using Google Flights, you must know it has this option to track the price of a specific flight and inform you about the changes by sending updates straight to your inbox. With RatePunk, the main difference will be that you’ll have this option after confirming your hotel booking. A notification will pop up on the success page offering you the option of receiving an update if the price decreases, letting you cancel that booking then & rebook with the lower price.

This option won’t be available on non-refundable bookings (because the user can’t cancel the primary booking without losing the money), so RatePunk won’t pop up after confirming that kind of deals.

What are your thoughts on these? Would you find these features useful? You can check the product & our website here: https://www.ratepunk.com/.