hotel booking sites - room availability

[Icecube]

please explain a poor idiot how they basically work.

I guess hotel brands like choice hotels, marriott, westin or other booking sites like priceline, expedia, lastminute etc give you an xml feed where you find hotels details to put on your site (such as descriptions, room images, other stuff etc)

once you have all these data loaded into your own database you have all you need to build a travel search engine...

how do you know if rooms are available? or you just don't give a fuck and send them the visitor?

Moreover, in CJ when an advertiser has products in

 

[gopher]

Yes, that's exactly

 

[dogfighter]

I think hotels.com and expedia are on CJ but they have specific terms about how you can and can't use their feeds... which is why so man "price comparison" sites open your search results in new windows.