Marriott Integrates Virtual Earth to Find Hotels

Today, Marriott replaced their MapPoint Web Service maps with Virtual Earth maps. The implementation is pretty straightforward in that you search for a hotel and get results and an overview map with locations pushpinned onto the map.Each pin has a popup with contact information and a link to their reservation system. You can also click on an individual location to see a map of a single location. The benefits are obvious - aerial photography around a hotel, bird's eye imagery to get high result shots of the area, draggable maps. Nice to see an upgrade. I have a couple complaints. I'd like to see the map bigger. When I switch to bird's eye I get hardly any real estate to navigate the area. Finally, the driving directions are preconceived and not generated from the Virtual Earth routing engine. All in all, this is a very simple way to integrate Virtual Earth and still have a huge impact on your site's usability and aesthetics.

CP