With the dawn of a new range of projects in Birmingham, commissioned by BWDP in 2009, we've pulled together a small team of journalistic photographers to check out some hotels around the city...
Hundreds of hotels to choose from...There's so many hotels in the UK's second city. From Five Star Superior grand hotels and luxury serviced apartments, to basic Bed & Breakfast accommodation.
Hotel reservations make up one of Birmingham's most competitive online industries. This is because profits can match those of other top industries, and it's far less unethical to sell hotel bookings than to encourage the retail of things like pills, porn and casinos.
But as saturated as the market may be, there seems to be a gap. BWDP has been working in successful partnership with LateRooms since 2007, and during this time we've noticed 3 kinds of website for Birmingham's hotels...
These include:
a) National, international and global giants, like LateRooms and TripAdvisor, which have a local department for Birmingham, but are not geographically dedicated to Birmingham.
b) Local multi-sector giants like Birmingham City Council and NEC Group whose websites are not dedicated to hotels but keep one foot in the industry.
These include:
a) Sites powered by feeds from giants like LateRooms & TripAdvisor, which just duplicate the content from the main sites and add little or no original content.
b) Sites which are full of keyword-stuffed dribble, written just to fill pages for search engine robots rather than to be interesting or useful for humans to read.
These sites don't feature such a wide range of hotels as sites like LateRooms & TripAdvisor do.
So we believe Birmingham Hotel Reviews can fill a gap in the marketplace by simultaneously being:
Further to the success of our basic project, there may be potential to extend our service, to provide local hotels with more formalised assessments including star ratings on a par with what the AA and VisitBritain do nationally.