I just love Google Street View. It’s such a nice way of exploring the streets around a Hotel where you wish to stay. Is there a vacant lot just around the corner or a beautiful park? those are the kind of questions you can answer with Google Street View. You can see street view for hotels located in the Cities where Google has deployed it. Like Paris, New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Sidney and many more, you can check on wikipedia for a more exhaustive list.
If you have not seen Street View on the site, it is one of the tab in the hotel information window. Here is a direct link to Street View in New York if you want to see it right now. What is there not to love about Street View then? It lets you see independent scenery surrounding hotels you wish to visit. That is true, but when was the picture taken? I think this is a problem that will only grow, you are capable to virtually visit many place on earth right now and you can see very reliably how those places looked 3 years ago… This will become more and more frustrating, what if Google film your street while a building was erected next to your hotel. As if those months of dealing with construction noise where not bad enough. You will have to handle 3+ years of customer getting cold feet seeing this scene in Street View. Those information are really time dependant and currently they are not presented as such, and until we get them near real-time, you should always take them with a grain of salt.