Are Hotel Sites Smarter Than A Web Analyst?

The folks over at TechCrunch ran an interesting piece about Farecast. It’s a travel website whose particular unique selling proposition is helping you predict the cost of airfare and will actually guarantee against price increases. Now they’ve added a hotel feature with a twist–it analyzes Farecast’s data and tells you whether you’re getting a good deal or not

But the service also looks at each of the hotels to let you know if it’s priced attractively or not. For most hotels, the star rating isn’t enough to tell if the price is too high or low v. local competition. Over the long run market forces even the playing field, but a traveler unfamiliar with a specific hotel can (and often is) overcharged occasionally. Farecast will help you understand if you are getting a deal or not on that specific hotel.

Hotels with good deals are marked in red. Over priced rooms are blue. Click on the image for a larger view of the interface.

It’s a clever way to help establish orientation and expectation, particularly useful traits when data is being interpreted by non-analysts.  Surprisingly, you don’t see that very often in dashboards or analytics packages.

You can do the same thing in Excel if you want.  Even if you don’t have time to build out a predictive model or forecast, you can use conditional formatting to set parameters of what’s expected/unexpected, good/bad, etc.  It can be your own judgment, performance against a target or average, based on seasonality, etc.  In Excel 2003, select the cells you want to apply conditional formatting to, say Revenue, and go to Format -> Conditional Formatting.

All you have to do is play with the formulas and the resulting format and you’re good to go.  Use the format painter to apply the same rules elsewhere.  FYI–If you’re using Excel 2007, it has a variety of pre-built rules such as top 10% or bottom 10% and colors you can associate it to.

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