Don’t know your Arsenal from your Elephant & Castle?

Active Hotels launches new London location page

Need help finding the right area of London? Visitors to London can now gain valuable insights from Active Hotels’ dedicated London guide, via a straightforward page presenting how the city is divided up.

Visitors spend many hours trying to find the most convenient and suitable area in London to reserve a hotel that simultaneously meets their needs and budget. A quick glance at Active Hotels’ London page will immediately clarify the city’s four primary hotspots in central London, each outlined in a brief information box stating ‘What’s here?’, ‘What’s near?’ and what you can ‘Expect to pay’. Whether after culture, shopping or nightlife, this useful tool will point you in the right direction, with a click-through to a wide range of hotels from budget to luxury that can be viewed by popularity, guest rating or star rating.

With Visit Britain running extensive campaigns to lure back US visitors to London, Active Hotels is committed to providing as much of a user friendly experience as possible and the new London page represents another step in the right direction. Attracted by London’s history, culture and royal family, Americans represent a growing proportion of Active Hotels’ customer base and the new London page makes booking city accommodation extremely straightforward. Combined with genuine, unedited customer hotel reviews (by traveller type), informative advice is made instantly available to assure travellers they are making the right choice.

American customers in particular have found the reviews service useful, in part due to a culture that is more geared up to writing online reviews and embracing every aspect of the online shopping experience. A mature couple from Miami in the US, submitted the following hotel review: “A family run business in extremely nice part of London, the room was a very good value for the price. Our street front room on the 3rd floor presented very little noise issues, as the street is very quiet after dark. The hotel is just a few blocks from some great medium priced cafes, and just a block or so from the Tube. The best shopping in London is within walking distance.”

Internal research has shown that Americans tend to favour Paddington, Hyde Park, Kensington and Earls Court areas for reserving their accommodation. From the US, mature couples represented the highest category of visitors to London, with this trend reversed for European visitors as young couples fell into the highest category of travellers into London, followed by mature couples in second place.

Adam Walker, Consumer researcher at Active Hotels stated: “With so many US and international visitors using our site, our aim is to help users who are not familiar with London to quickly find the right hotel in an area suitable for their needs. What’s more, our customers can be confident that whichever of the 4 hotspots they choose, their hotel will be within a short distance of London’s major attractions.”

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About Active Hotels (Priceline Europe, part of priceline.com, NASDAQ PCLN
Active Hotels (Priceline Europe, part of priceline.com, Nasdaq: PCLN), is one of Europe’s leading online reservation providers to the hotel industry. The company has over 11,000 hotels, which it promotes through 1,500 distribution partners, including some of the market leaders in online travel. See: www.activehotels.com for more details.
In July 2005, Priceline acquired Amsterdam-based Bookings B.V. to complement its investment in Active Hotels and build on its European operations.

Combined, Active Hotels and Bookings have exclusive rates with almost 18,000 hotel properties, giving Priceline Europe a market leading position in Europe.

Media enquiries:

Mandy Zakhour, European Media Relations, Priceline Europe, [email protected] tel: + 44 (0) 1223 578134