Start your booking: Google Hotel Finder comes to mobile

Mobile hotel booking is becoming a big space, and for good reason. Long gone are the days when all travel plans had to be made before you left; now they can be made at a moment’s notice and from anywhere.

As a result, a number companies that offer like the ability to book a room on the go, such as Hipmunk, Room 77 and  HotelTonight, have been popping up, and making a big name for themselves. And now Google wants in on the action as well.

The company is taking its Hotel Finder, which it launched back in 2011, and optimizing it for mobile, it was revealed on Tuesday. The service is what it sound like: it lets users find, compare and book hotel rooms. And now people can do it on their smartphone as well.

“When you need a hotel or when wanderlust strikes, why wait until you get back to your computer to start planning your next trip?” Maciek Nowakowski, Product Manager at Google, wrote. “Hotel Finder now makes it easier to find and book a hotel right from your phone.”

All a user has to do is go to www.google.com/hotels and search for their destination. Search results can be filtered by price, hotel class, user rating and distance.

Users can find photos, and learn about hotel amenities and reviews and see its location on a map from the same page. They can also save hotels to help compare them. Once a hotel is selected, it can be booked either by using Google Wallet or via another payment method. The Google Wallet payment method is only available in the United States right now.

Hotel Finder is currently available in 100 different countries.

The hotel booking space

Google will have plenty of competition if it wants to dominate the mobile hotel booking space. Many of these companies have been raising money over the past year or two.

There is Hipmunk, a series of travel site, which raised raised $15 million in a Series B last year. In May, the company announced that users could now book hotels directly through the site or mobile app.

In January, hotel metasearch engine Room 77 raised $30 million in a Series C round, bringing its total raised to nearly $44 million.

And, in July, GetGoing, a travel site founded in January 2012 that lets you find discounted flights moved into the market for hotels.

The San Francisco-based startup, with backing from Y Combinator, Digital Sky Technologies, Lightbank and Data Collective, partnered with Expedia to get access to cheap rooms across 140,000 hotels worldwide.

The gold standard, though, is last-minute hotel booking application HotelTonight. It lets users book same-day rooms on the cheap from their phone. The company says doubled the number of downloads of its mobile apps to over 6.5 million in just the past year.

HotelTonight recently raised $45 million in Series D funding, bringing the company’s total funding $80.35 million.

(Image source: http://digitalmarketingturistico.it)