Rss And Hotels

aycrum88 · Joined: Jun 13, 2004 Posts: 1

Hi all,

I'd like to pick some of your brains!

I work for a company that sells european hotel rooms online through an affiliate network, and I'm thinking of setting up my own affiliate website with hotel content published using RSS.

a) Does anyone know of any similar products - not necessarily using hotels.
B) Would anyone like to collaborate with me on this venture? I'd be looking for java programmers and web designers.

My current thinking is that the site would be more of a contribution to and test bed for the semantic web (which I think is currently lacking commercial strength outside publishing) than a profit-hungry monster.

I'd be grateful for any feedback,

Joe

cat5e · Joined: Apr 26, 2003 Posts: 589

I would suggest that you should try few RSS feeds using a Reader and see how it look like.

This page has a lot of RSS links relating to variety of industries may be you can find an Idea.

http://www.rssreader.com/rssfeeds.htm

There are Sites (mainly personal Blogger) that revolve around RSS.

Here is an example for general Hotel Feed: http://z.about.com/6/g/hotels/b/index.xml

A Commercial Site? I do not think so.

You probably need to build a nice commercial Site and add RSS as component to publish certain aspects of you products.

I am sure that there is a specific product for the Hotel industry. You probably have to resort to XML editing.

B)

ploesch · Joined: Aug 22, 2003 Posts: 4060

This is an interesting idea.

Let me make some assumptions to see if were on the same page:

You want to have the feed list available rooms/villas/etc.
you would need a link to XXX where you get affiliate Credit. (easy to do with RSS)
You would want to include a picture. (easy to do with RSS)
You would have a side bar on your page listing the feed content. (Can be done easily enough)
You will at any given time have more than 15 rooms available. (This is the hard part)

With these assumptions, it should be rather easy to establish the feed, the only real problem is the limit RSS has, which is 15 items in a feed (ouch).

The only way I can see around this limitation is to have a content management system that puts Random availabilities in the feed on an hourly basis, or follows some other rules you set up. You might even be able to have feeds set-up based on specific criteria, such as City, or Country, or Dollar amount, etc. You would need a good CMS for this, but it is possible.

I hope I was helpful.