Foreign Perspectives

Sometimes the upgrades that appear the most complicated turn out to be the simplest in the end and so it was with an upgrade to our listings sites which I’ve been putting off for ages.

What it does is to allow the properties listed to specify exactly which facilities that they offer from air conditioning to swimming pools.

At first glance it looked like it would be quite difficult to do but that first glance was clouded by having seen how other accommodation listing places do it. Every single one seemed to go out of their way to make it complicated by adding tickboxes and dropdowns at every turn and even then they don’t always get it right. For example, one place we’re listed with let’s you say that you take pets but if you say that you don’t then it doesn’t say anything at all about it on the website.

In fact, many of the options are like that. It’s often the case as with the pets that you would want to explicitly say that you don’t take them but, for marketing reasons, most hotel listings sites only list positive options so, for example, they’ll say that you have a swimming pool but won’t say anything if you don’t. That’s fine for the swimming pool option but not so for the pets one where you need the negative stagement to be displayed.

Anyway, with that in mind my implementation gives the owners the choice about including the negative information where appropriate.

Next up is the search facility for that but fortunately that looks like it will be relatively easy to do and in any case the existing search function will also work on the facilities list albeit taking a few days for google to pick up the new content if you change something.