Can my customers see on a map where a hotel actually is before they book it?

Yes, in most cases your customers can see a hotel on a map before they book. Hotel booking APIs normally send a location for each property along with the name, address and photos, so your portal can place a pin on a map and show the streets around it. Depending on how your portal is set up, customers can switch from the normal list of results to a map view and tap a pin to see the rate for that property, which helps a lot when someone cares more about being near a beach, a station or a conference venue than about the hotel itself.

How accurate the pin is depends on the supplier. Chain hotels in big cities are usually mapped very precisely, because that data has been checked over and over by many people. Smaller guesthouses, apartments and properties in rural areas are sometimes placed on the nearest main road or town centre rather than the exact front door, and now and then a property sits a little away from where the pin appears. The written address that comes with the booking is usually the more reliable of the two, so it is worth showing both to your customer.

Distances to landmarks, like how far the hotel is from the airport or the old town, are a separate matter. Some suppliers send a list of nearby places with distances and some send nothing at all, so you will see this on certain hotels and not on others. We prefer to display it only where the supplier provides it, because a made up distance creates far more complaints than a missing one.

If map view matters to the way you sell, tell us which destinations you work in most often so we can check how well your connected suppliers map those areas and decide whether the map should sit beside your search results or inside each hotel page.