Whenever a new online hotel intermediary surfaces, it typically talks about the frustration that travellers experience when planning trips.

Over the past few years, the online accommodation category has witnessed several interesting start-ups. While some have focused on enabling travellers to visualise what they are booking, others have offered the best price. Then there are those who intelligently promise ‘value’ for hotel rooms that are actually undervalued.

One aspect that always garners attention is personalisation and is in fact that’s a good starting point for any startup. Recently London-based travel startup Top10.com officially introduced its hotel meta-search platform which promises to simplify the process of finding the right hotel by automatically creating a personalised Top 10 lists of hotels for any destination in the world. “We think the era of hotel price comparison and meta-search has just begun,” says Alex Buttle, co-founder, Top10.com.

Most users, he explains, visit five to ten websites before making a hotel booking so it is likely that at least 50% of online users touch a meta-search site at some point during the booking process. While Buttle acknowledges that globally Kayak and Trivago are breakthrough brands in this space, he argues that it’s a huge market with massive potential.

EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta talks to Buttle about Top10.com’s new offering:

EFT: How did the idea of creating a personalised Top 10 list of hotels for a destination come about?

AB: Finding your perfect hotel on the web is still challenging so we wanted to make the process ultra-quick. It’s easy to get bogged down in review sites, unstructured lists of hotels that all look the same but have massive disparities in pricing. Sifting through options can be a painful experience which is why we have tried to cut all of that out and present people with a simple Top 10 list of well-curated hotels in seconds.

As for the idea behind the lists, a Top 10 is the perfect list format for a person to review quickly without getting bogged down in options. It’s the ultimate presentation format for a hotel price comparison website.

EFT: Can you explain what ‘ultra-quick’ means in terms of the time taken?

AB: If you know your dates, your budget, where you want to stay and the type of hotel you want to stay in, then booking a hotel using Top10.com should take ten to 15 minutes, maximum.

If you’re still deciding where to go, then your hotel booking will inevitably take longer on Top10.com but we find that most people who visit our platform already know where they are headed so finding them the right hotels in a destination of their choice is our primary focus.

EFT: Can you also explain what form of personalisation the site offers?

AB: We are really focused on personalisation and giving people useful shortlists. Our filters and price sliders for instance give users a high level of personalisation, and combined with our TopRank technology, we are confident we can present a great Top 10 list of hotels for all our users no matter where they are going.

Personalisation can also be looked at in terms of device used, and when and where (physically) you are looking to book a hotel. We are working on new products here to personalise the experience based on these factors.

Every area of improvement we have considered comes back to the fact that the hotel booking experience on the web isn’t perfect and we think we can improve it. Personalisation of hotel search is an area of great opportunity as are areas like last minute local hotel deals, mobile hotel search and booking apps. These are the areas we will focus on.

EFT: Tell us about how you make the site user friendly…

AB: Simplicity is key to Top10.com; we have tried to strip everything down to the bare essentials most people need to make a smart hotel booking. We’ve done this through things like intuitive design, limiting the number of filters displayed by default and hyper-quick market scanning.

At destination level, our own user testing suggested these are the most popular features people look for on our site:

So we include them by default. We also include others like these listed below under ‘more options’:

Everything has been done to make the site as easy to use as possible. We’ve done our job well if people make the decision to book quickly.

EFT: Since its soft-launch in beta this April, your site has achieved $750,000 in monthly hotel bookings. Are you also taking direct bookings, as some meta-search websites are doing?

AB: We may look to integrate direct bookings into Top10.com in coming months if user testing suggests our customers prefer it. We are open to anything that will improve the customer experience.

EFT: What sort of technology is driving the top 10 lists of hotels?

AB: We have developed our own technology called TopRank which looks at things like user review scores, price, popularity, distance from the centre of town and many other factors. Even if you don’t have time to specify your own criteria, TopRank will find you ten great hotel deals straight off the bat for any destination in seconds.

EFT: What form of data analysis is the team doing and what’s the source of the data?

AB: It’s all about data and we analyse everything. From hotel market stats to paid search keyword performance, from partner conversion to split testing page copy - data powers all of our decisions. Hotel meta-search is a scale game and to be effective in this space, super-smart use of data is essential to scale quickly.