Find a City's Hotspots

CityHeat can help you find the parts of a town or city that are best suited to you and your interests. As well as finding the best neighborhoods for your tastes it can also find you the perfect hotel for your stay.

To find the locations in a town best suited to your interests and tastes you just need to tell CityHeat what you want to do on your visit. CityHeat can create local heatmaps for any type of venue. For example, if you want to stay somewhere with plenty of places to eat then you can enter 'restaurants'. CityHeat will then show you a heatmap showing where restaurants are concentrated in your searched town.

Alternatively if you want to work-out you could enter 'gyms' to find out the areas with the most gyms. You can enter as many requirements as you want into CityHeat to find the areas with the biggest concentration of all your interests.

CityHeat can show you details of individual venues suiting your tastes. It will also show you all the local hotels in any of the areas that you have identified as a good place to stay. You can even click through to book your stay at your new favorite hotel in your new favorite part of town.

I haven't looked under the hood of CityHeat but I suspect it uses the Google Places API to identify the city hotspots and the individual venues.

Mapping London's Winter Wonderland

If you are visiting London this winter you can look forward to ice skating at Somerset House, the Christmas market on the South Bank, the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square and the Christmas lights decorating Oxford Streets.

London Covered by glh Hotels is a nice interactive map of things that you can see and do in London this winter. It is also a clever way of marketing glh's London Hotels. The map shows the locations of London's special winter events, ice skating rinks and winter markets. It also shows the location of some of the best stores to visit to complete your Christmas shopping.

As you browse the map you can add any of the points of interest that you fancy to your own personal itinerary. You can, of course, also book your stay in any of the featured glh hotels.

The map itself is a nice custom designed map with neat illustrations of the featured points of interest. The custom map has been made interactive using the Mapplic mapping library. Mapplic is a mapping library which is particular effective in creating interactive maps from your own custom made maps or images.

Video on Street View

You can now explore inside the largest temple to bad taste in the world. The Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai is a gloriously attractive building, unfortunately is appears that they hired Liberace as the interior designer.

Thanks to a partnership with Google you can take a virtual tour of the hotel on Street View. Despite the quite incredible poor taste of the hotel's interior Jumeirah Inside is an incredibly well designed Street View tour. A side-on plan of the hotel allows you to quickly navigate to the various Street View tours of the lobby, restaurants, bar and hotel rooms.

If you select the Street View of the lobby you can even view the Cascade Waterfall in action. There are three buttons beneath the waterfall which actually allow you to view the waterfall in action on Street View. Select one of the numbers and you can view videos of the waterfall's fountain shows seamlessly superimposed on top of the 360 degree panoramic Street View scene of the lobby.

Berlin's Airbnb Streets

Airbnb vs Berlin is a wonderful data driven investigation into the popularity of Airbnb in Berlin and the possible effect it is having on affordable housing in the city.

Among the interactive maps used to illustrate the investigation is Airbnb Streets. The map highlights the streets in Berlin with more than 20 Airbnb offers and reveals that many of the properties listed on Airbnb are in popular tourist areas. In particular there is a high concentration of properties in areas that are popular with young travelers.


Another interactive map in the article visualizes the number of Airbnb listings by neighborhood. This choropleth map shows in which areas of the city more flats and rooms are offered on Airbnb. The Reuterkiez area in Neukölln is the most active neighborhood on Airbnb with 476 rooms and flats listed within only a few blocks.

A third map shows the locations of properties by the top 10 'power users' in Berlin. There is one user who lists 44 separate properties in Berlin on Airbnb. This rise in 'super users' suggests that Airbnb is being used as a business tool. It appears that more and more Airbnb listings are being rented on a commercial level by landlords exploiting the service to make higher profits from short term rentals rather than from renting out their properties to long term tenants.

Via: Visualoop

Airbnb Price Maps

Our favorite Dutch mapper maps.Amsterdam.nl has created a fascinating Airbnb price map for Amsterdam. Using the map you can find out where the most expensive and cheapest Airbnb properties are concentrated in the city.

The Property Value of Airbnb map plots the nightly rates for staying in Airbnb properties across Amsterdam. Each Airbnb property on the map is colored by price and rather neatly demonstrates how the cost of Airbnb properties on average are most expensive in the city center and become cheaper as you radiate out from the center of Amsterdam.


Tom Slee was inspired by the maps.Amersterdam.nl Airbnb map to create a number of Airbnb price maps for a number of other cities around the world. Airbnb City Maps uses Google Fusion Tables to show the price of Airbnb properties in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Montreal and Sydney.

The way that Fusion Tables displays the property markers means that the maps are a little hard to read, especially if you want to determine if there is any overall price pattern within each city. However Tom has included a link to the Fusion Table for each map. This means that you can use the Fusion Tables' filter controls to explore each map in more detail.

For example, if you check out the Los Angeles map in Fusion Tables, you can filter the map to show only the most expensive Airbnb properties. This reveals that many of the most expensive Airbnb properties in Los Angeles are beach front properties or those nearest to the coast.

Hotel Heatmap Search

I noticed recently that Hipmunk are the latest well known website to have dropped Google Maps in favor of MapBox. I always liked the heatmap option on Hipmunk hotel searches and I'm happy to see this feature is still available on their new look maps.

You can search for hotels on Hipmunk by location and date you and view the suggested results on a map. The map not only contains all the suggested hotels but also allows you to view a number of heatmaps of the city. These heatmaps highlight areas good for tourism, restaurants, shops and nightlife. This provides you with a great way to search for a hotel in an area that suits the purpose of your trip.

Hipmunk also provide the option to refine the hotel results displayed on the map by different categories. These categories (buttons located above the map) allows you to view hotels that Hipmunk recommend as 'kid friendly', 'luxury', 'business' or 'romantic'.

The Frequent Travelers Reward Mapper

Many frequent travelers take advantage of the reward packages offered by the top hotel chains. These programs offer award points to customers that can be redeemed for free nights in hotels around the world.

AwardMapper is a useful Google Map for anyone who travels frequently and needs to find hotels where they can redeem their hotel award points. The map allows users to search the map for hotels by location and by the number of award points. The map even includes the option to search for individual hotels belonging to specific hotel chains.

Ride Share to Room Share

Outpost is a peer-to-peer trip planner. The application lets you find a ride to your destination with Ridejoy, book a room with Airbnb and find things to do, once you reach your destination, with Vayable.

To use Outpost you just need to enter a home address and a destination, the dates of your trip and the number of people taking the trip. A route for the trip is then shown on Google Maps, alongside the results for available ride-shares, Airbnb rooms and suggested things to do from Vayable.

The rides, rooms and events can be viewed separately in the map sidebar. If you like what you see you can click the 'buy now' button and click through to book the selected option on Ridejoy, Airbnb or Vayable.

Find a Hotel in the Best Part of Town

Avuxi is a great new hotel finding and booking search engine that allow users to quickly visualise the most popular areas and venues in town.

Avuxi plan to offer global coverage and you can already see how the site will work with their initial launch of a hotel search map for Barcelona. Using Avuxi it is possible to view heat maps of the areas in Barcelona with the most restaurants, bars & clubs, or shops. It is also possible to view a heat map of the most photographed locations.

Using the heat maps it is therefore possible to view the area of Barcelona that will most appeal to you based on your own tastes. If eating out is important to you then you can quickly visualise on the Google Map the best place to stay with great nearby restaurants. If bars and clubs are more your scene then you can use the map to find the most lively areas of town.

Hotels are also displayed on the map and if you mouse-over a hotel map marker you can get a quick view of the number of stars it has and its nightly rates. If you click through you can compare the nightly rates across over 30 of the top hotel booking sites.So when you book your room you should be able to ensure you get the best price.

The Mobile Tourism Google Map

The Mobile Bay Activity Finder is a great Google Maps based guide to places to stay and things to do in Mobile Bay on the Gulf of Mexico.

The map includes three categories of locations useful to anyone visiting the area; 'activities', 'stay' and 'services'. The sidebar menu is really nicely implemented. Each category includes a number of subcategories  and each subcategory can be added or removed from the map using a simple on/off button.

Each subcategory can also be subcategorised by simply clicking on its name in the sidebar menu. For example, under 'activities' you can view all 'attractions' on the map or you can select 'attractions' and select individual subcategories, such as 'churches' or 'museums' to view an individual subset on the map.

Holiday in New Zealand or Australia

Stayz is a handy Google Map for anyone looking for holiday rental accommodation in Australia.

Users can search the map for property by location, by date, by price and by number of beds. If you select a property on the map the information window provides a quick view of the price per night and  user ratings. If a property appeals to you then you can click through to view further details about the selected property.


Rankers > Respect NZ has used the Google Maps API to map every New Zealand campsite and a range of outdoor activities that you can undertake in New Zealand's beautiful great outdoors.

You can select to view 'campsites' or 'top rated activities' by clicking on either of the two buttons above the map. If you select to view campsites on the map you can zoom in on individual markers and mouse-over to view the available facilities and view the average user review of the campsite.

If you select the activities option the map markers show the location of walking routes, with information about track lengths and user ratings.

Book a Flight and Hotel with Google Maps

Southwest Airlines have used Google Maps to create two useful applications to help passengers find and book the cheapest flights and hotels.

The Southwest Airlines GetAway Finder tool helps users to find flights for specific dates and then choose and book a hotel. The application takes the customer through a number of short steps that involve picking the starting point and destination, the dates of travel, selecting a hotel and the flight before allowing the user to book their selections.

If the user is only interested in booking a flight, without a hotel, they can use the Southwest Airlines Flight Guide. The guide allows the user to pick a starting point and then shows the cost of flights to destinations across the USA. If a destination is selected from the map the user can view all the available flights for the dates that they wish to travel.

Australian Holday Rentals on Google Maps

Stayz is Australia's most popular holiday rental property website. The site allows users to find and book holiday rentals throughout the country.

It is possible to search for properties on Stayz via regional Google Maps that show all the available properties within an area. Users can refine the results displayed on the map by the cost of accommodation, by rating and number of guests.

Stayz also allows users to view a pop-up Google Map in the listings view of search results. A 'Map' link under each property listing allows the user to quickly view the location of the property on a small Google Map without leaving the listings page.

Chilean Motels in Street View

Here's the first app I've seen that uses the new Street View (released last week) in Chile. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of Pillando.me is, but it seems to be a collection of Street Views of motels in Chile.

The sidebar includes links to a number of Street Views of motels and if you select a link from the sidebar the Street View automatically moves to that location. The sidebar also includes a nice scroll effect that spins the links as you scroll up or down.

Hat-tip:  Street View Funny

Finding and Booking Hotels with Google Maps

Mapov.com is a Google Maps based search engine for finding and booking hotels.

To find an hotel with Mapov.com you need to enter the location you wish to visit. A Google Map is then displayed showing all the available hotels. The displayed hotels can be refined by date, price, number of stars, TripAdvisor rating and by amenities.

The information windows on Mapov.com are really nicely designed. If the user clicks on the rating system (at the top of each window) then another window appears displaying TripAdvisor reviews for the selected hotels. At the bottom of each window a quick link is provided to book the hotel. If the user desires a different booking service than the one shown then they can click on the down arrow and select another site.

Find a Hotel on Your Route

If you are planning a very long drive and you need to find a hotel along your route then try HotelBetween.com. Enter a starting location and your final destination and tell the application how far along the route you wish to stop for a break and HotelBetween.com will suggest a hotel for your overnight stay.

A slide control allows the user to adjust the number of miles along the route they wish to travel. If you adjust the slide control then the map automatically updates to suggest a new hotel. Each suggested hotel includes a guide price, a rating and a brief description.

If you like the sound of the suggested hotel you can then click through to check room availability, current rates and book your room.

Finding Hotels in Croatia

Find.hr is an excellent Google Maps based website for exploring and booking accommodation in Croatia.

The application allows users to find hotels by location, price, rating and type and even view nearby points of interest. Two simple drop-down menus allow the user to select the price range and star rating of the accommodation they are after. Selectable radio buttons in the sidebar then allow the user to choose what type of accommodation (hotels, family hotels, apartments or private accommodation) they wish to book.

Categorised points of information make it easy to find what kind of facilities are available in the area around a hotel. For example, if you want to find a hotel near a beach, you can select 'beach' from the points of information menu.

Google Hotel Finder Isochrones Experiment

Google Hotel Finder is experimenting with an isochrone layer to search for hotels within a defined travelling time of a location. For example, this search with Google Hotel Finder shows all the hotels within a 30 minute public transit travelling time from the 2012 London Olympics Park.

The Hotel Finder experiment allows users to adjust the travelling time, switch between public transit or walking times, and refine the results shown by price range, star rating and date.

Via: Ed Parsons

Finding Hotels with Google Maps

HotelMaps.com is a hotel finder that uses Google Maps to help you locate and book hotels near any destination.

What makes HotelFinder.com stand out from other map based hotel websites is the use of dynamic map markers to quickly show the user the price and star ratings of the recommended hotels. It is possible to search for hotels by date and location but the user can also refine the price, the star ratings and the guest ratings in their search.

The hotels found in a search are then displayed on a Google Map with markers that show the cost per night for a room in the hotel and the number of stars the hotel has. Users can quickly refine the displayed hotels with three slide controls that allow the user to refine the price and star ratings of the results.


Hipmunk, the flight planning and booking tool also has a hotel search function that includes an interesting hotspot facility.

Hipmunk allows users to search for hotels by location and date. The results of each search are shown on a Google Map, with green markers showing the cheapest rates and red the most expensive. It is also possible to sort the results by price, reviews and distance.

Hipmunk also allows users to overlay a number of heatmaps over the results. The heatmaps help the user to see which areas of their destination have high and low concentrations of restaurants, museums, bars etc.

The heatmaps are a useful tool, especially for users booking hotels in unfamiliar locations. In many ways the function improves on Google Hotel Finder's tourist spotlight feature.



When you search for a hotel with Google Hotel Finder the map tourist spotlight highlights the most popular areas for visitors to stay. Google Hotel Finder also includes a useful area search tool that allows the user to adjust the area that they are interested in staying directly on the map.

UK Holiday Parks on Google Maps

Find Parks is a directory and review site of Holiday Parks in the UK. Britains who are looking to book their annual holiday can use the Find Park Google Map to find the hoiday park that best meets their requirements.

The map shows the locations of UK holiday parks and can be searched by a number of categories. Users can refine the results shown on the map by the facilities provided by the park, company provider and even search for parks that are within selected distances of a beach.

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