iOS App of the Day: HotelTonight

Have you ever traveled to a city and unexpectedly needed a hotel room? It’s usually an unpleasant experience to try and frantically look up hotels on your mobile device on various hotel sites. The whole time you’re just hoping you won’t have to fork over your whole paycheck to book a room the same day. Fortunately lucky travelers who find themselves in supported cities can use the HotelTonight app for iOS to find a last-minute hotel at a fraction of the cost. For our Canadian readers HotelTonight has also recently added support in Toronto and Vancouver and plans to expand to more cities outside of the US in the near future. What’s even better is that the HotelTonight app provides users the ability to book same-day hotel rooms for up to 70% off. Who doesn’t like a bargain in a pinch?

Pros:

• Quality hotel pictures of rooms and amenities
• Each hotel listing includes full description, location, amenities
• Exclusive low prices just for HotelTonight app
• Same-day bookings up to 2am
• Up to 3 daily deal promotions
• Additional cities are added frequently

Cons:

• Not every major city is supported
• Depending on the day and location available rooms may be extremely limited

How it works:

HotelTonight focuses on the last-minute traveler and the mobile app allows its users to find bargains on hotels by booking the same day. You can find a wide range of hotel accommodations including luxury hotels, bed and breakfast inns, and inexpensive motels. After a quick download of the app you are asked to allow the app to use your current location, which is necessary to really use the service. After enabling your location settings to “on” you can immediately browse through hotels in your city. To view additional hotel details tap on the specific hotel listing you want to view and you will be able to see a variety of hotel pictures, hotel amenities, the price of the listing, and where the hotel is located on Google Maps. To book a room simply select the number of nights you need, and tap the large green button on the bottom of the screen that says “Book a Room”. You will have to create an account to proceed with booking. Creating an account doesn’t take long and within five minutes your room is booked and a confirmation of the reservation is emailed to you.

The HotelTonight app also allows you to view three daily promotions for rooms at intense discounts in your nearby area. HotelTonight changes these promotions frequently by rotating through various hotels that they work with in that market. While the deals were ridiculously low-priced they were always sold out leaving them to be of no benefit to customers who couldn’t act fast enough.

HotelTonight supports the following cities: New York, Boston, Miami, Atlantic City, Atlanta, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Brooklyn, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, Newport RI, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Anaheim, Seattle, Reno, Palm Springs, Portland, San Jose, Silicon Valley, Phoenix-Scottsdale, Honolulu, Vancouver and Toronto.

Conclusion:

What I love about this app is that HotelTonight provides hotels specifically to travelers who need a room at the last-minute. The app’s interface was much easier to navigate through then having to suffer through a full desktop website especially when time is of the essence. While I did see an impressive selections of hotels in the cities that work with HotelTonight, only a few  hotels on any given day would actually have available rooms. The upside to a lower selection of available rooms in a particular city is that if you can find a room it is usually priced an intensely discounted rate. Overall, this app is the perfect travel companion for anyone who finds themselves on the road in need of last-minute accommodations.

HotelTonight is available for free in the iTunes Store. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 4.0 or later. iTunes Link

This is part of our iOS App of the Day series. We take our favorite app for iOS for each day and post it here for you to check out. Feel free to check out all of our App of the Day posts here.