Hotel Reservations - Last Minute Bookings


Welcome to SunsetCities.com. The first incarnation of this web site was developed in late 1997 and launched in 1998. The idea behind the first incarnation of SunsetCities was to show the cities in the Las Vegas Valley at sunset. The sunsets in the Las Vegas Valley are a sight to behold The second part of the domain name comes from a domain naming trend that was popular in the years before the turn of this century - calling everything "cities". The was (and is) Geocities and dozens of this and that cities. Why buck the trend? We had no idea that we would still be around so many years after the site was launched. The reason SunsetCities has survived because the domain name and theme are sufficiently vague so as to allow the content to be flexible. The first reincarnation of SunsetCities came in 1999, when we became a photo site. We focused on the cool places in and around Las Vegas and posted photos that showed these places in a complimentary light. We still carry these photos and you can still view them at Red Rock Canyon, Valley of Fire, Hoover Dam and at other places throughout this site. The next year, 2000, we began to present information about the apartments in Las Vegas and Reno apartments for rent. The idea was that if we were successful in getting good placement in Google for the search term "Las Vegas apartments" we could charge advertising fees and this would generate some revenue. We succeeded in getting great rankings in Google. We were number 1 for seven years for that search term. The odd thing about this was that we could not get the apartment complexes that we promoted to pay us, even when we had an agreement. There are two ironies in this. First we saw that apartment complexes preferred to pay larger companies a lot of money to advertise them even though they had a lower ranking. The next irony was that the companies that we did have agreements with were chronically late in their payments. The irony is that these same companies would not hesitate to evict their tenants if they were late in their rental payments. After seven years of this we gave up on trying to deal apartment companies. Their lack of support for a local company that was ranked number one was hard to fathom but we moved on. We moved into the hotel reservation business. We found a reservation system that was secure and allowed us to provide the lowest possible prices for hotel rooms. We compared the rates that we were able to charge with what other web sites charged and our rates were either the same or lower. In order to distinguish our web site from the many others we focused on showing visitors the amenities available at each property. While many web sites focused on reviews we felt that reviews were often unreliable given that we were able to review places that we had not even stayed at. Reviews are often conflicting and a good or bad review is listed possibly long after the issue was resolved or other issues had come up. Reviews are a great way to build ginormous web sites but how much they really help people is difficult to measure. We also added online chat. This feature lets the visitor communicate with a reservation agent to get the latest best deals, more information and to book group rates. Online chat also adds a personal touch that other web sites do not. We have a toll free 800 number and offering customers three ways to make a reservation, online, phone, chat, adds value to the visitors experience. Currently we are building our hotel pages and this takes a long time. Many of these pages are done, many are not. The pages that we were using in many places have dead links because the system we use changed have information is retrieved. This was done in an effort to make the process faster and more accurate. We should be done updating all links and adding new properties sometime in 2011. This is an enormous effort as there are more than 45,000 properties that we have to build around.
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