Hotels near me iPhone app review: Hotels near me- hiding under false pretenses

Hotels Near Me, I thought, was designed for me (or people like me)- to help us find the cheapest and closest available hotel of our choice (how silly of me to be excited about this)- but now, I feel bad about sticking to my false hopes.

To begin with, the app is badly designed: as soon as you click on the app icon, a Splash screen zooms up 10,000% into a grainy bad resolution “h”. Now, hotel.com might presume that it’s a stylish way to hide the fact that they are later going to direct you to the safari browser (yeah we know, it’s shocking, isn’t it?), but it’s just in bad taste, and, completely useless.

The main screen content is excellent though – concise, to the point, lays down the benefit of using this app; but, that’s where the excellence ends.

An addendum to the app’s bad design is its just-as-bad functionality: after you have been cunningly directed to the safari browser, with no way of returning to the app, your first list will be a page full of hotels. It will take you 5 seconds to realize that that list is the list of hotels around the location of where you currently are (before you have put any search criteria in). This means that you can only use this app when you already are in the neighborhood of choice. If you were hoping to use this app to do quick research and reserve a hotel at your destination while boarding a plane – then this app is not for you. Also, the search option doesn’t let you choose more than one search criterion at a time (e.g., you can either choose according to dates of availability, or price, but not both.)