[avalaunch]

Really well done, beautiful and useful site. Out of curiosity, how long did this take you to build? What stack are you using?

A couple of things I noticed:

1. After updating a search, the back button doesn't work the way I would expect it to. If I choose to look at a property and then back out it takes me to the pre-updated search whereas I would expect it to take me back to my search with filters in tact. If I don't look at a property and press the back button it takes me out of search altogether where I would expect it to take me to the pre-filtered search.

2. On the search results page, the stars confuse me. I don't know what they represent.

3. It would be nice to be able to see hotels that score below 60 (perhaps as a filter option). Budget conscious shoppers might find they are lacking options otherwise in certain cities. Sometimes you're just looking for the best of the cheapest, even if it's not a 60+ hotel.

4. From the blog page, I think the TripExpert logo should take you to the main TripExpert home page, not the TripExpert blog home page. I see the Visit TripExpert link but considering that is (probably) the primary action you're probably hoping for, I think it shouldn't be hidden in the nav like that.

5. I was also initially confused when I added a filter and the search results didn't automatically update. I think that's become such a standard UX that you might want to adopt it too.

Overall though, this is really impressive. Great job. I think you have a wonderfully bright future ahead of you.

EDIT: Added 4th suggestion

EDIT 2: Added 5th suggestion

[aknicol]

Thanks for the feedback! Very glad to hear that you like the site so much. I agree with a lot of your suggestions, and some of them (like the filters automatically updating) we're going to be implementing soon. To answer your questions, it took about 9 months to build the site (RoR), although the majority of that time was spent developing a back-end that we use to manage all of the hotel and review data.

[avalaunch]

Awesome. So what do the stars represent? Is that a different sort of rating for each hotel?

[aknicol]

It is actually just the "standard" 5-star hotel rating scale. (I put standard in quotation marks because there isn't actually a worldwide common standard for what constitutes e.g. a 4-star hotel.) We've been wondering about whether it is confusing for people to display this alongside our own TripExpert Score. Sounds like you think it is?

[avalaunch]

Yeah I really had no idea what it was. I think the TripExpert number score is enough. That's the number that matters. At least that's what you're telling me, so why muddle that with another number.

The main reason to include the 5 star rating would be if your score was relative to that. For example, an 80 at a 5 star hotel was much better than an 80 at a 3 star hotel. But I don't think that's the case, is it?

[aknicol]

I agree. We're probably going to delete it. Thanks for the feedback!