Our new hotel review design.

By Pete Meyers–

We’re celebrating some exciting stuff at EuroCheapo HQ today. At long last, we’ve pulled back the curtains on a new site design and have made a giant upgrade to our technology. That’s right, Cheapos, we’ve put on our “fancy pants.”

Here’s a sampling of what’s new:

1. Enhanced city pages

Our new city pages (for example: Paris, London, Amsterdam…) now include neighborhood maps, dynamic hotel listings, aggregated (and verified) guest ratings, and easy access to other city guides. We also included links to EuroCheapo’s Twitter and Facebook pages, along with an archive of previous blog posts. Want to see it in action? Have a look!

2. Smarter hotel listings

In addition to reading our hotel reviews, Cheapos can now view guest ratings from our reservation partners and read reviews written by verified hotel guests. Furthermore, you can see the hotel’s location on an interactive map and view other hotel picks located nearby. We’ll also show you nearby landmarks, and provide you with more real-time information in the pricing module. Sound tempting? Try it out!

3. Helpful hotel filters and sorting tools

We’ve included all “sorts” of new filtering and sorting tools to help you find the perfect budget sleep. You can now sort by “most viewed hotel,” “user rating,” and more.

For example, say you’re looking for a hotel in Paris’ Latin Quarter that costs less than $100. Now you can quickly sort our hotels by neighborhood, by price range, by property type (hotel, hostel, pension, B&B and more), by average guest rating, or by properties that are frequently viewed by other Cheapos. And just to help out a little more, we display all of this information on a big Google Map that displays proximity to public transportation and other points of interest. Want to see it in action? Here you go!

But wait, there’s more!

These are just a few ways our new “fancy pants” will help budget travelers plan smarter and travel cheaper. We’d love to hear your feedback–what do you think, and how can we do better? Tell us below!

Special thanks to the EuroCheapo Insiders who provided all sorts of helpful feedback and, of course, to our tech superstars, Mike and James.

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Over the last several months, we’ve been quietly toiling away at redesigning the EuroCheapo homepage. After many revisions, tweaks, testing, more tweaks, bug testing and pulling solid patches of hair out of our collective heads, we finally took it live late last night. Hallelujah!

What’s with the redesign, you might ask?

Well, we loved the way the previous version looked, but we felt it didn’t feel particularly “alive.” Given we’re constantly updating hotel reviews, city guide articles, blog posts and other content, we wanted this constant activity to be reflected on our homepage as well.

Our new design allows us to showcase five featured hotels every day, highlight each day’s newest blog entry from our editors and writers, and promote a new featured article from our city guides. Every day you return back to EuroCheapo you’ll see a fresh batch of selected hotels, blog entries, articles and maybe - just maybe - a few more surprises we have up our sleaves here at EuroCheapo HQ.

Also, we’ve received lots of great feedback over the past year from fellow Cheapos who just discovered how helpful our search engine is in quickly finding budget hotels. Many of them, though, hadn’t previously completed a search on EuroCheapo out of concern that doing so would take them away from the site or not allow them to view our search results.

To address this, we also redesigned our search box and gave it a little more “front and center” prominence on the page, to help other Cheapos discover and experience its magical budget power!

Bug zapping

While we tried to catch each and every bug prior to launch, we’re sure we missed some. Heck, we just realized our blog entries aren’t formatted correctly (this will be taken care of shortly!) However, if you do come across anything that seems, well, weird, confusing or broken, please email us and let us know.

Special thanks

We’d like to say a special thank you to a few of the Cheapos who helped us with this big project. To our tech wizards, Mike and James, thanks so much and we’ll do our best to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6. And to the many EuroCheapo Insiders who provided so much feedback and comments throughout development, thanks for taking the time to help us out!

What do you think? We’d love to hear any additional comments and feedback about the new homepage design in the comments section below!

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Last month we announced the launch of the “EuroCheapo Insider” program, which gives our readers the opportunity to view and comment on things we’re working on before they go live on the site.  This allows our readers to get involved with EuroCheapo, and helps us make the site even more helpful to budget travelers.

In the weeks since we launched EC Insiders, we were delighted by the volume of requests we received from Cheapos in more than 10 countries. And so we thought, heck, let’s release more invites! 

So if you’d like to join us, please send us an email and become a EuroCheapo Insider! 

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