Ask HN: My strange pain point – is it a startup idea?

I used to work in the travel industry. You wouldn't believe the explicit wishes/demands of people: bed size, shower type, hard floors, no stairs, fridge, no yellow lights (really), double ply TP, south facing windows, vincinity of freeway exit, you name it.

The thing is: there's an infinite number of data you'd have to gather. I feel your pain (we need a children's cot and that alone is almost impossible to filter with AirBnB) but it'll be really hard.

I feel your pain. I've been travelling for the past 6 months, and have become the world's foremost critic of booking.com's UI in that time. That site, despite dominating the entire planet when it comes to such things, has no option to select [x] I REQUIRE A DESK TO WORK FROM

It's unbelievable how far gone these sites are from scenarios like yours and mine, and it'd be so easy to fix up.

Or they lack any understanding of the areas they market. I'm currently in Kathmandu, can I filter hotels by those that have a heater and hot running water? Of course not, but sure, I can filter by 100 options like "Airport shuttle", "24/7 front desk", and differentiate between a "hostel" and a "lodge", or whether the room has "soundproofing", 99% of these of which every hotel will tick yes to.

Another pain point -- WiFi. There are 100 ways they could measure this, but not a single one implemented, even a sliding "how shit was your connection? during the review, or, say, a surreptitious "How was your check-in?" e-mail that runs a miniature JS speed test in the background

Another travelling scenario - short term contracts around London. I don't care where I sleep, I care about rail and bus routes _only_. Can I search by that on any site? Of course not

Meanwhile I actually built a niche site around that last one, but it can't stand on its own -- it'd never become popular or turn any kind of profit, the only hope is that a big site with roaring revenues like Booking.com would somehow see the need, and spend a few working days worth of developer time on it. But that'll never happen, because the improvement to their bottom line would most probably be minimal -- I'll still use booking.com whether or not they implement the feature, because there are so view viable alternatives in this sector

I hear you - I've often wanted a feature to reject apartments/hotels without an outdoor pool (don't like indoor pools).

The trouble is building a database is going to be a huge project and "view" is a little subjective. Wouldn't you have to basically replicate AirBnB's database but with a better interface? You would probably end up doing something like web crawling TripAdvisor or something like that (which is against their policies by the way).

Or is the plan to allow people to build their own personal lists from Booking.com, TripAdvisor, AirBnB etc.? - if the latter I think that is a good idea, but ultimately you've still got to find those apartments so you run into the original problem again.

p.s. writing this from 32 floor apartment with a spectacular view out over Manila. Not top floor but I've heard nothing at all from above me! (Booked via AirBnB)

For tagging apartments as "I don't like it", you could create a browser extension that automatically hides them. That aside, I think dirktheman's comment is relevant; I don't think the data you want is useful for most other users.

Probably too small a demand.

The general problem is property search with lots of options, and even that is a tricky niche... I worked at a company that tried to do this, and in the end we found it's too much work per niche.

Maybe if NLP gets a lot better.

I will suggest that people who want it with a view may be a small number, but probably a well heeled group. That absolutely does not make the radar of people on a budget. So if you build it, you might be able to charge a membership fee.

Practical problem is how do you get hosts to provide all this extra info and trust them to be honest and accurate.

I can't even search for real estate and specify houses without getting apartments or vice versa

a place where people could build sql queries and save them for others.

Maybe you could use:

http://commoncrawl.org

I kinda remember a site that saves html in tables to be queried.

What about sendin an automated massage to the landlord like "top floor with nice view?". What about not giving a fuck about such unimportant things and spending your time more wisely? I mean if I want to live every month in a different accommodation I can not expect having the same comfort than in my dream flat. It's like expecting that the food at a restaurant tastes like being cooked by my mother.

I don't think there's a huge audience for this.