Walk Score is best known for their rankings of residences, assigning a score on a scale of 1 to 100 on how easy it is to walk to bus stops, restaurants and grocery stores.
But the Seattle startup is doing a lot more, and this week took the wraps off a nifty little project they are dubbing the Hotel Finder.
As the name suggests, you can type in up to four locations (company headquarters, coffee shops, friends’ residences, etc.) and then find hotels with the shortest travel times to those locations, sorting by car, foot, bike or transit. That means business travelers can get a sense of how far a hotel is from an important meeting, or families can research the distance between hotels and popular vacation attractions.
Walk Score Chief Technology Officer Matt Lerner tells GeekWire that the Hotel Finder is more of a prototype to showcase its Travel Time API, but he also thinks it could prove to be a valuable tool for travel planners.
As you can see on the map, it is estimated to take 18 minutes to walk from the DocuSign offices to the La Quinta Inn. By car, it would take one minute, and by transit it would take two minutes. There do appear to be some hotels missing, for example the Homewood Suites by Hilton near the Big Fish headquarters on Western Avenue.
Walk Score came up with the hotel listings through the Expedia Affiliate Network, and Lerner said that they have not done much work on hotel coverage since the underlying goal is to license the travel time API, which also launched this week.
Here’s another example of travel times to hotels from popular Manhattan art museums.
