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If you have ever arrived at a hotel tired and weary only to find your hotel room bears no resemblance to what you booked, your fairy godmother is on hand. Room 77 has just launched its searchable website and iPhone app to counter just such a disappointment.

Room 77 is aiming at business travellers who want compare a number of rooms in luxury hotels which may all sound the same but in reality are poles apart. For leisure travelers, the view from the room may be even more important. Certainly luxury hotel chain Starwood Hotels has given it a firm thumbs up.

The database will offer basic details on room category, square footage etc, but the app will also allow potential clients to tap into the view from the actual room you are being checked into. With a database of 400,000 images of participating hotel rooms you can quickly check whether that ocean view is truly breathtaking or whether it is an awkward side view only visible when balancing on the window ledge. This is WYSIWYG at its best – what you see really will be exactly what you get.

The downside? The database currently only covers 25,000 luxury hotels in major American cities and popular resorts in Hawaii. It focuses only on luxury hotels and has no plans to broaden its database to three star hotels. As founder Brad Gerstner explains, your view in budget hotels is generally limited to the parking lot so it is really irrelevant. He does have a point.

Curious readers may wonder how Room 77 actually got into 400,000 rooms to film the view. Apparently they used Google Earth-style satellite technology and made adjustments for latitude, longitude and altitude. They also interviewed people in the know at hotels – the concierge and front-desk clerks - to get the real low down on the best rooms in each hotel.

Those who value a room with a view will find the Room 77 app a godsend. For the indecisive, booking a room could become very tedious indeed.

by Gillian at Luxique Luxury Hotels

Google Earth, which allows web-users to look at satellite images of practically anywhere on the planet, is now offering a virtual tour of one of the world’s leading art galleries.

Viewers will be able to scroll around a three-dimensional representation of the Prado Museum in Madrid and examine in the finest detail fourteen masterpieces by artists including Velazquez, Fra Angelico and Goya.

A spokeswoman for Google Earth said the paintings had been photographed in very high resolution and contained as many as 14 gigapixels.

“With this high-level resolution you’re able to see such fine details as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces by Rubens and delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent From The Cross by van der Weyden,” she said.

The arts correspondent in the Guardian newspaper in the UK, Jonathan Jones, applauds the new technology, but says there are many things about the Prado that can’t be rendered digitally. “The world’s greatest museum bar, for one thing, and the atmosphere of its galleries.”

If you’re heading to the Spanish capital to see the art treasures ‘for real,’ book a luxury Madrid hotel through Luxique. We offer nearly two dozen, many of which are within walking distance of the Prado.

by Andy Moreton