Reviewed: Agoda's new hotel booking app for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch

There's a new iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch hotel booking app out for business travellers, which will be especially useful if you're looking to book last-minute hotels on the road.

We're big fans of booking apps, since hotel websites are almost uniformly unusable on mobile devices. This one's from Agoda, the Singapore-based subsidiary of US booking giant Priceline.

It's an excellent app to have a few finger-taps away in case you need a night at a hotel urgently -- if your flight is delayed or cancelled, or if you need to extend a business trip and your current hotel can't accommodate you.

You can either use a "near me" GPS search or punch in a location:

Irritatingly, you can't sort results by price, though you can sort by star rating to kick the backpackers and one-star fleabag motels down to the bottom of the list:

You can also tap through on a very responsive Google Maps integration, which works well:

Usefully, the app will aggregate hotels into neighbourhoods, so in an unfamiliar city you can see where the main hotel districts are so you don't end up on the wrong side of the tracks:

At an attractive price of "free" and coming in at a compact 2.6MB, this is an app that will find its way onto our iPhones.

Download it from the iTunes Store: US link | AU link

John Walton

Aviation journalist and travel columnist John took his first long-haul flight when he was eight weeks old and hasn't looked back since. Well, except when facing rearwards in business class.