Can my customers search for hotels near a particular area or landmark through your hotel booking API, or only by city name?

Yes, in most cases you can search by area or landmark and not only by city name. A hotel search request will usually accept either a city reference or a set of map coordinates with a search radius around them, which means you can centre the search on an airport, a railway station, a beach, a hospital or a well known landmark and bring back the properties around that point. Many searches also return the distance from the point you searched, so you can sort the results by what is nearest and show that on your page.

How well this works does depend on the supplier content behind the search and on the plan you are on. Some suppliers describe neighbourhoods and districts very carefully, while others only give you the city and the coordinates of each hotel, so a named district search may be reliable in big cities and patchy in smaller towns. If you want to offer your own list of landmarks, you will often need to build that list yourself from the static hotel content and store the coordinates for each place you want to sell, rather than expecting every supplier to recognise the name your customer types.

It is also worth remembering that a radius search is a circle on a map, not a local person's idea of where an area begins and ends, so a wide radius can pull in hotels your customer would not really call nearby. Keeping the radius sensible and showing the distance clearly usually solves this.

The next step is to run a few test searches around the areas and landmarks you sell most often, compare the results against what you already know on the ground, and ask us which search methods are available on your plan before you design your search page.