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How to find a Hotel in Paris? Ask Mahalo!
October 9, 2007
Yesterday evening, I had to find a hotel in Paris for my trip to this year’s Le Web 3. Usually that means wading through hundreds of useless, but perfectly search engine optimized pages on Google or clicking back and forth on sites like TripAdvisor – a pretty annoying, time consuming process with a very uncertain outcome.
But then I remembered that when Jason Calacanis launched his new “Human-powered search engine” Mahalo, he very often used the example of finding a hotel in Paris. If you ask Maholo for hotels in Paris you are supposed to get a pre-selected (by a human/editor) list of good options instead of gazillions of stupid booking platforms. Nice idea – in theory…
So I asked Maholo for hotels in Paris and got this page: easy to use, straight-forward with a reasonable number of choices. In the “Moderate Hotels” category I found one that was in the right location: the Hotel Langlois – it looks nice, has a great rating on TripAdvisor. It even got free Wifi! I booked my room and was all set in less than 10 minutes. Wow!!
Not sure how well Maholo works for other things. The idea of human powered search seems compelling, but keeping up with the Web is quite a task and I am not sure if humans are really up to it. Anyway, in this case Mahalo worked definitely as advertised. So, mahalo for the help, Mahalo! ;-)
Posted in Postings in English, Search Engine Business 
Tagged with Mahalo, Paris
just checked and found that the same page also exists for London. which answers one of my facebook q’s.
October 9th, 2007 at 19:46
I work at Mahalo and created the Paris Hotels page. I’m so glad that you found it to be useful! I hope that you will continue to use Mahalo and give us feedback on your experiences with the service.
October 9th, 2007 at 22:11
Thanks for the tip. I will try the same for my upcoming trip to San Francisco – hope I will be done in 10 Min, too :-).
October 13th, 2007 at 20:06