Hotel Road Trip Planner

If I was a hotel company looking to increase business at rural locations, I'd set up a road trip planner application on my website, based on Google Maps or a similar service. The prospective customer would enter a start point and a destination with a range for how long they'd like to drive on each leg. The software would then solve for an ideal route with a single price to pay for all hotel stays combined. Bundling the hotel stays would keep the customer from seeing the individual room rates, which would help prevent them from shopping each stay, but the bundle overall could be offered at a significant discount since each stop can be optimized for the most vacant hotels.

Obviously, this is only useful if the customer wants to go a long distance AND bring their car, such as for an extended stay or as part of a permanent move. (There's something to be said for the experience of seeing the gradual transition of the landscape. Nothing happens quickly until you start to notice things, and then it's sudden and magical, like waking up.) Other business would come from the usual airport-based traffic.