Montreal Tech Watch

I’ve bumped into SeeYourHotel a while ago, when they listed the url on the 1st startupcamp montreal wiki. At that time, it only looked like a very simple Google Mashup, with pins for hotels. They had data for a few Canadian cities, as well as Paris, with video guides of selected hotels. Overall though, it looked more like a experimentation, so I didn’t mention it on MTW.

Fast forward, and it now looks like a solid and useful website. Other sites like TripAdvisor or Expedia err on providing exhaustive information to travellers, such as key places, activities, user-reviewed places, flights, etc. etc. SeeYourHotel on the other hand does only one thing: let you see through the list of hotels, select a few & compare them, with pictures and videos of the hotels.

Compared to the initial debut of the website, they don’t produce videos anymore but get videos and pictures from other websites such as youtube or flickr. Of course, the mapping technology also relies heavily on Google Maps, which makes SeeYourHotel the quintessential web2.0 / mashup site.

When you finally choose a hotel, reservations are handled by hotels.com which gives them referral fees for successful reservations. The business scheme is so simple and one of the most elegant one could hope for.

YourSeeHotel is made by Jean-Francois Noel and Vincent Desjardins, from a joint venture named 3rd Crust, a company based in Quebec city.