I was helping my wife plan a business trip to London and we were looking for a hotel. She wanted something trendy and in a safe area close to her office, but we realized we didn’t actually know the city all that well. Peoples opinions on the internet were all subjective and pretty much no help at all, so we were left to ask around and hope for the best. Why can’t I measure the general safety of an area while booking my hotel online?
Being a lover of statistics, I had to take the idea of a safety rating for an area further. Using Sydney, Australia as the location for my map, I was quickly able to gather more than enough info: http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/ is packed with stats, including specific numbers of crimes per suburb and a list of the worst nightclubs for assaults:
The outcome of all this data would look like a combination of the Orbitz hotel map of Oakland:
I couldn’t see hotels lining up to use a service like this as it could potentially paint them in a very negative light, but why not look at the data from a glass half full perspective? If you were to take the “Crime rate” map and flip the data to show the safest areas, you would be able to give hotels in a family friendly location a boost without having to demonize hotels in the areas with higher crime.
Development and implementation of something like this would be near impossible, not to mention a sites liability for crimes that take place in an area designated “safe” and constantly changing numbers could further complicate the issue, but wouldn’t it be great from a consumer perspective?
I don’t think Hotels need to be involved in this… it could be a cool mashup project to take a hotel geo-code XML feed and mash it up with crime data. We should talk
http://www.hiconomics.com Hiconomics
There are quite a few Crime Maps based on mashups of government data + Google Maps. For London you can use: http://maps.met.police.uk/
I don’t think Hotels need to be involved in this… it could be a cool mashup project to take a hotel geo-code XML feed and mash it up with crime data. We should talk
Safety, the missing hotel ranking system
I was helping my wife plan a business trip to London and we were looking for a hotel. She wanted something trendy and in a safe area close to her office, but we realized we didn’t actually know the city all that well. Peoples opinions on the internet were all subjective and pretty much no help at all, so we were left to ask around and hope for the best. Why can’t I measure the general safety of an area while booking my hotel online?
Being a lover of statistics, I had to take the idea of a safety rating for an area further. Using Sydney, Australia as the location for my map, I was quickly able to gather more than enough info: http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/ is packed with stats, including specific numbers of crimes per suburb and a list of the worst nightclubs for assaults:
And this map from http://mike.teczno.com/:
I couldn’t see hotels lining up to use a service like this as it could potentially paint them in a very negative light, but why not look at the data from a glass half full perspective? If you were to take the “Crime rate” map and flip the data to show the safest areas, you would be able to give hotels in a family friendly location a boost without having to demonize hotels in the areas with higher crime.
Development and implementation of something like this would be near impossible, not to mention a sites liability for crimes that take place in an area designated “safe” and constantly changing numbers could further complicate the issue, but wouldn’t it be great from a consumer perspective?