Since its release in June 2011, roomsXML has worked non stop in the background to improve the quality of the mapping.

"The hotel is on the beach.." was on every hotel website, but the common feedback from pax was "3 km away is not on the beach".

So in June 2011, roomsXML released its mapping feature. View the original promo release here

Mark Luckey, MD of roomsXML Asia Pacific says "The agent feedback was instantly fantastic. The map clarified the geographic position of the hotel, features like the price range slider allowed agents to fit to customer budgets, empowering agents to be better informed."

By late 2011, it became obvious to roomsXML that not only were the hotels not always on the beach, but some of them were in the middle of the ocean.

Luckey says "Anything up to 25% of the geocoded data provided to us was incorrect. We had Australian hotels in London, Sheraton's where there should be Holiday Inn's, properties that google said were in Antarctica."

roomsXML then undertook to clean up the data, in many cases manually cross-referencing and updating from a number of sites to get accurate hotel locations in place. This now means roomsXML has the most accurate geocoding of hotel locations of any hotel wholesaler.

"To get the data right, we have taken over 1,000 man hours of data cleansing. Many people are familiar with the new Apple mapping product and the problems it contains. The fact that we've got 15 months experience in hotel mapping function gives the customers using roomsXML a significant advantage. We've even got wholesalers coming back to us asking if we can update their mapping data for them."

This is further underpinned by the fact roomsXML only shows each hotel once whilst some competitors continue to list hotels under three or four different names and in turn, show them in three or four separate locations on a map.

"Travel agents just don't have the time to filter through inaccurate data and replicated and confusing results. It's a competitive industry and roomsXML are continuing to focus on delivering high-value and usable products , underpinned by best practice customer service, to support travel agents around the world."