Once again, the Hotels.ng interns have come together to build something awesome. The project is called Spots.ng, and it is a platform that wants to redefine travel, discovery, and fun. If you can recall, earlier this month, those same interns built a location referencing API for e-commerce companies.
Spots.ng plans to expose Nigerian hotels and best spots with directions and reviews about them to the rest of the world. According to Hotels.ng’s blog, “Spots.ng is a product that aggregates all the fascinating and fun spots in Nigeria, provides comprehensive reviews, exact directions to the spots, and a list of nearby hotels where you can rest.
The site will suggest interesting spots and tourist attractions in Nigeria to users based on their preferred travel location. It will also provide information such as directions, safety ratings and reviews. Spots.ng also relies on its parent company, Hotels.ng to provide hotel bookings and lodgings at a discounted rate to tourists and users who discover and experience Nigeria through their platform. The platform currently has over 3285 locations available.
In CEO, Mark Essien’s words, “Spots.ng is our attempt to map out all tourist locations in Nigeria. We are on a mission to open up Africa to travel and show all the beautiful places on the continent that can be travelled to. Spots.ng ties into that – now people can finally see and choose from all the fascinating locations that Nigeria has to offer.”
A quick search on the site shows that there is a problem with the search function. You can currently only get accurate results for major cities, like Abuja and Lagos. A search for any state capital will lead to results from the whole state. Anything specific, say “restaurants in Abuja” brings up no results.
It does classify search based on location, though, and as such, a search for Jos will bring up results for Plateau State.
A search for Ekpoma in Edo state showed no results.
But one for “Benin” will bring up Ambrose Alli University in Ekpoma as its first result.
A search for a state capital will bring you results for the whole state. I searched for Abakaliki, the capital of Ebonyi state, and this came up.
Now, if you factor in the fact that if you want to search for a type of spot, e.g searching for a restaurant in Abuja or Lagos, you’ll have to deal with 402 and 1644 results respectively, spots.ng doesn’t seem so convenient.
That said Spots.ng currently has over 3285 locations available, and can only get better. There are plans to add more features and curated spots to the platform over time.
