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 What Do You Think of TVtrip.com?
 If you've ever had to crawl over your twin bed to reach the bathroom of your 175-square-foot hotel room, or pulled up to a ramshackle building that looked nothing like the idyllic picture on the property's Web site, then maybe you've had the same idea as the people who invented TVtrip.com -- somebody should videotape what hotels really look like and put it on the Internet!
TVtrip.com is the answer to cautious hotel guests who've been burned once or twice by closet-like bathrooms and moth-eaten bedspreads. The site offers professional videos of thousands of hotels, which show not only guest rooms but also public areas and surrounding neighborhoods. Watch a Triptv video of your next hotel and you'll be prepared for the ugly drapes, but you'll also know that the place has a colorful, well-lit lobby and an upscale grocery store next door. Plus, you won't have to rely on member reviews (although TVtrip provides those as well) written by anonymous guests who may or may not share your opinion of what constitutes a clean bathtub.
The TVtrip site promises to "help you make the right hotel choice" with its mini-movies, maps, photos, reviews and hotel search function, but does a one-and-a-half-minute clip of a building and a bedroom really give travelers an idea of what to expect? And does TVtrip have enough video footage of hotels to warrant a trip to its site? We put TVtrip to the test to see if it's worth a look before you book.
 The Basics
TVtrip was founded in 2007. The site sends film crews around the world to capture short, one- or two-minute videos of hotels and their surrounding areas. As of this printing, TVtrip claims to offer reviews and information on 33,291 hotels in Europe, the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region. The site only has 6,252 videos -- that's less than a quarter of the hotels listed on the site. TVtrip supplements its still growing cache of hotel videos with features like member reviews, interactive maps, links to booking sites, photos and detailed hotel descriptions. Average room rates are also displayed alongside TVtrip's hotel reviews.
Competitors
There are many hotel sites offering member reviews and photos, but in the field of hotel videos there are very few major players. TripAdvisor, which offers hotel videos from members as well user reviews and photos, is probably TVtrip's strongest competitor. What sets TVtrip apart are its professionally produced videos. It doesn't have nearly as many reviews as TripAdvisor and other travel booking sites, and its member reviews and hotel pricing are secondary to its main goal of showing informative video footage of hotels around the world. Trip.tv is an overseas site that also shows video footage of hotels, but, to date, that site has only 628 videos.
Test Drive
How It Stacks Up: I first attempt to search for a hotel in my home town, Philadelphia. I type "Philadelphia" into the hotel search engine on the home page, only to discover that, according to TVtrip's search function, Philadelphia does not exist. Destinations can also be searched by clicking on a name on the destination map, or by clicking on one of the popular cities at the bottom of the page. Philadelphia is not an option.
How about Los Angeles -- the second largest city in the U.S.? No results.
 But when I select "New York," TVtrip gives me 142 hotels. I choose the most popular one, La Quinta Hotel in Manhattan, and up pops the video. It reveals the hotel exterior, bathrooms, rooms, lobby and fitness center, with background muzak that gives the movie a cheap and cheesy feel. I can see the outside of the hotel (an elegant high-rise building), nearby streets and bustling New Yorkers who don't seem to care that they're being filmed. The video also includes views from standard and twin rooms, which is only partly useful since views can vary widely between different rooms in the same hotel.
The minimum price over the next 30 days for La Quinta Manhattan, according to TVtrip, is $212 per night -- a bit higher than the rate of $199.99 listed on the hotel's own Web site.
I can look at 161 reviews of the hotel -- with ratings on a scale of one to five -- and read more reviews by clicking on a booking.com link, which takes me to another window with a list of short, two- or three-sentence comments. The "Rooms" tab shows amenities and rates from booking.com and venere.com --these links will take you to another page where you can book a room through these sites. The "Photos" tab offers a slideshow with 12 photos.
Next, I turn my sights toward Europe, which appears to be a well-represented destination on TVtrip (most of the featured cities on their home page are in Europe). I search for a hotel in Dublin and get a list of 80 hotels, which can be sorted by price, popularity, name, hotels with videos, stars, style (beach, family, luxury, etc.), and amenities (gym, pets welcome, Jacuzzi, etc). I am surprised to see that Dublin offers one "beach" hotel, Tara Towers, which supposedly sits along Dublin Bay. However, TVtrip's map does not depict Dublin Bay anywhere near Tara Towers, and its pictures display a distinctly urban setting -- not a seashell or stretch of sand in sight.
TVtrip says the minimum price per night over the next 30 days for this hotel is $146. According to the Tara Towers Web site, midweek rooms are available in the next 30 days from $137.59 per night.
There are no available videos for this hotel. I can request a video (I am the second person to vote for a Tara Towers video!), but I have no idea when, or if, there will ever be a Tara Towers video and I am not about to postpone my make-believe Ireland vacation to see some quick camera shots of a Dublin "beach" hotel.
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