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This is a reasonable idea, and we do it where appropriate. But you have to remember the burglar's approach to a locked first-floor window -- hit the second story. The hotelrezzers , like other spammers, will happily hit any category in the ODP. Sometimes they seem to deliberately choose wrong categories, hoping to get accepted by accident. Although we will be removing some "Hotel Directory categories," I expect the submittals to continue all over "regional," and we can't very well shut down the Podunksville category just because one of the affiliate jerks is pushing his "comprehensive directory with online reservations" for all of the zero (no, I am really NOT making this up!) local hotels therein.
Yes i'm familiar with their rules and terms and no i've never had any problems with getting my sites listed(Maybe i'm just lucky).
My only problem is I wish they would speed things up a bit with accepting new sites. But that's an obvious problem.
with regards to hotel reservation,
I am currently attempting to get a hotel reservation site entered into DMOZ (can't submit it at the moment due to server errors).
This is a genuine and innovative booking engine recently created by my employers.
It offers a service to end users that is not available elsewhere for our region.
Surely such a site should be included into DMOZ and not regarded as spam - just because a lot of other people are spamming in hotel reservations.
Any one hotel is therefore reluctant to give up, say, 2 rooms to each of a number of different engines. That means that a hotel will have substantially fewer rooms to let itself.
Therefore most booking engines are affiliates, linking back to one "master site" - hence no unique content.
Hence meta editors reluctant/refusing to discuss listing/merits of such sites
>It offers a service to end users that is not available elsewhere for our region.
Interesting. But there are still two problems I can see with getting an ODP listing.
I do not believe that hotel room booking engines can be both considered "innovative" and "genuine" -- unless you are using the words in a Microsoftian sense.
And I do not believe that there are any regions in the inner solar system that are not already covered by hotel booking systems.
Cornwall's insight into the industry practice might help explain why having FEWER such independent sites is a benefit to all concerned -- hotels, travellers, directory editors and surfers alike.
At this point, the ODP hasn't banned such sites altogether, but I know of no other category that has ever come so close to being banned, and yet managed to avoid it.
Hm, coming at this from the point of view of both an ODP editor and someone with some experience of this field, I don't think this is strictly true. How many hotels in France have online booking systems? It would be interesting to count up the number of hotels in each major online booking database. When we've done that I'll tell you exactly how many hotels there are in France... :)
According to websites:
Active Hotels has of the order of 250 hotels in France
France Hotel Reservation had 2500 at the end of 2001
I think lastminute.com has about 200
lodging.com has 937 in Paris, probably then up to 2000 across France in total
Anyone know any other figures?
I would not say that "car rentals", "cruises" and "flight reservations" are, in general , much cleaner!
I'll agree with that (and also share both sets of experience). I would argue there is value in localised booking engines offering their own services to smaller pensions, guesthouses and apartments which don't have their own website. If they exist they are quite often buried by affiliate sites, they are sometimes run by local tourist offices, and they tend to be outside the North American area, but they are there.
I think if you were to dig further, then...
>>We will continue to list sites like Expedia, Travelocity, etc because it's pretty obvious their content is unique. <<
...you will find many more French hotel sites listed on these booking directories.
France would not (in the area of hotel online booking anyway) appear to be out of step with the rest of the solar system.
Well, if you had said that, I wouldn't have disagreed with you.
But, speaking from the underside of the toxic spam pile, I _can_ say that proportionately much less of the spam is car, boat, and airplane reservations, and I get the impression that those markets are less devious about their affiliations (whereas the hotelrezzers are in full-deceive-distort-and-deny mode).
>I would argue there is value in localised booking engines offering their own services to smaller pensions, guesthouses and apartments which don't have their own website.
And so some ODP editors would argue. And that is probably the main reason why we still at least consider the possibility of listing such sites.
Note well, though: "online reservations" is NOT the valued content! A good directory of local businesses (whether or not they have their own website), with or without online sales, can still be reviewed on its own merits. The presence of overpowering advertisements for online reservations is likely to keep a site from being listed, whereas NOT giving any way of making reservations will not be any barrier at all to a listing!
According to your defition this booking engine is genuine because we have real availability that is exclusively dedicated to us. Also the Hotels deal only with us they do not have any availablility on other booking engine sites. They link to us from their sites.
Whether you can call the engine innovative is a moot point - what is innovative and what is gradual improvment? however any hotel that has looked at it has told us that it is the best of the bunch - and we use the latest flash technologies to their fullest extent to give a much improved booking experience and an extremely flexible property management facility.
I firmly believ that we should be in DMOZ -
a) because we have the best booking interface for our region
and b) because we offer availabilty in properties that is not available any where else
because we offer availabilty in properties that is not available any where else
This is unique content and as such definately merits inclusion in the directory. The trick is making sure your unique content stands out in a sea of junk.
thanks for the vote of confidence - I was beginning to think there was no chance of getting in.
When you say making sure that the unique content stands out - you mean making this point very clearly on the home page of our site so that a DMOZ editor will see this? (ie explicitly stating that the availablility is not available elsewhere)
This might look a bit strange for everyone else - in particular the hotels who have taken our booking engine and also customers.
A hotelier might think - why are they crowing about our availability that we have given them.
From a marketing standpoint you could add a slogan or graphic of some sort to your homepage along the lines of "Authorized booker of the following hotels" or "We've got listings for hotels no one else has." These are obviously horrible ideas, but then I think you've got the idea of what I'm talking about.
The second option would be to create a seperate page on your site (not linked from anywhere) which explains how and in what way your booking engine has unique content. Then when you submit your site include a note to the editor in the same field as your description, pointing to this page as well to this discussion at WebmasterWorld. So it would look sort of like this:
TitleTitleTitle: DescriptionDescriptionDescriptionDescriptionDescriptionDescriptionDescription. [NOTE TO EDITOR: Please look at abc.com/abc.html for an explaination of our unique content. Also see this thread at Webmasterworld for more info: [webmasterworld.com...]
