You're headed to San Francisco for a romantic and relaxing trip. You'd like a room with Internet access, and price is also a search factor.
You can use a search engine to scan thousands of sites for a room. When you find a price to your liking, you can book it with a few additional clicks.
Now let's say you're headed to San Francisco with your family. You want "family friendly" activities nearby and informal, fun restaurants within walking distance. It's an entirely different atmosphere than the first searcher seeks.
But both will do the same search for a San Francisco hotel. Clearly, each is looking for a much different property.
Price is not the only variable in these searches for finding a budget travel room.
Value is important, too. The wrong hotel at the right price isn't much of a bargain.
There are tools that allow you to see reviews of San Francisco hotels. But these two searchers are likely to find hundreds of property reviews for a city that large. TripAdvisor.com alone has 237 properties listed for San Francisco. Just the top five combined have about 1300 individual reviews attached.
This is a great resource, but it's so vast that many travelers are likely to get overwhelmed. That's just one Web site. Most of us visit five or more, picking up bits of information about good hotels, important things to see, dining and even shopping.
Kango.com has built a service based on the very principles of Internet searching. It uses meta keywords and tags to refine your travel searches.
Kango claims its search will eliminate everything but the relevant recommendations. It will scan reviews for keywords such as "family friendly" and "romantic getaway."
Founder Yen Lee is the former General Manager of Travel at Yahoo.com. Kango claims to have analyzed about 20 million opinions from 1,000 Web sites.
But how do you use Kango? Click "next" to the right and find out how it works.
