Shan Huang

11 Feb 2014

Hotel facility codes:

TOP 30

56:  Television

6: Car Parking Facilities

3: Broadband Internet Access

202: WiFi Internet

292: Parking (Free)

22:Non-Smoking Rooms Available

21:Air Conditioning Available

41:Premium TV from Cable or Satellite

53:Room with Hair Dryer

2: In-Room Service

209:Full Shower

1: Center for Business Activities

148: Fax Services

136:Photo-copying Facilities

7: Pool Facilities / Swimming

60: Clothes Washing

17: Guest Elevators

8:  Pets Allowed & Encouraged

139: Work Desk

34: Safety Box / Deposit Box

5:Dining Area / Restaurant

19: Laundry Service

51: Hot Beverage Maker

253: Storage for Luggage

49: Business Meeting Area

66: Outside Garden Area

10: Access for those with Disabilities

29: Dining and Banqueting Area

4: Gym / Fitness Area

65: Tours Organized

LEAST 30

(Ignore the first column. They are the numbers of hotels that have the facility. Also I filtered out the codes that have fewer than 50 counts because I found the interpretations were usually inconsistent.)

50 237: Bar / Pub

59 138: Work Desk

75 269: Quick Check In / Out

89 271: Late Check-Out where Available

98 273: Lesbian & Gay Friendly

102 146: Document Binding

104 265: Rooms to Accommodate Families

107 149: Laser printing Facilities

138 248: Bidet Provided

150 216: Dressing Gowns / Robes

158 161: Flip chart Available

182 279: Special Anti-Allergy Room Available

243 105: Kids’ Playground

247 227: Kid Friendly Menu

248 124: Ecological Themed Tours Available

264 177: Bespoke event planning

278 184: Knock Light Facility

307 156: Meeting Manager / Co-Ordinator

369 174: Events & Ceremonies

371 176: Rehearsal Events & Dinners

373 152: Document Scanning

374 91: On Site Nightlife

377 116: Terrain Walking / Hiking

496 110: Wildlife Watching

562 122: Wine Tasting Available

604 89: Facility for Karaoke

616 160: Conference Management

661 150: Ideas Blackboard

703 119: Ice Skating Facilities

717 87: Football Pitch

2

Each point in the map represents the hotels in a particular coordinate range near the point, with size showing the number of contained hotels. This helps limiting the size of the points in Europe so that Europe doesn’t explode into a puddle of black ink. I added toggles for hotel facilities so that you can filter hotels by facilities. The toggles cover the top 25 most common hotel facilities, the top 25 least common hotel facilities and 10 selected facilities that I find particularly interesting.

1The red areas above shows how many hotels are filtered out after adding the last facility.

To interpret the facility codes that come with the raw data, I visited the hotel pages on hotelsbase.org and manually matched the codes with the text. It was a painful process, worsened by the fact that some code was duplicated or off by one. If I had done the data scraping project first I would totally have parsed the codes with scraped text, but sadly I did it the wrong order…

The two plugins I used were ofxUI and ofxCSV. I enjoyed ofxUI a lot. Its UI looks geeky and awesome, although the library lacks fine-grained customization functionalities.