I’m always happy to share new innovative solutions that make my travels better and even happier when these tools are built in my city from people I know well. My friends Stefanos Vasdekis and John Nousis have created Travelmyth, a hotel search engine that helps travelers discover unique hotels by recommending the best hotels according to their interests and preferences.

Travelmyth offers you the possibility, by using advanced algorithmic technology, to plan your next vacation based on your interests and not necessarily the destination, by “replacing” the cities of the world map with more than 50 hotel themes. Whether you prefer cycling over hiking, tennis over horse riding and vineyards rather than palaces, Travelmyth helps you decide or even better offers you the possibility to have it all in one “package” if you try a complex search.

The hotel search engine allows even the most complex searches among tens of thousands of destinations and more than seven hundred thousand hotels around the world, even if you are not sure where you want to go or where you want to stay. Visit the official page of travelmyth.com, select what you like most from a list of 55 hotel themes and then choose among the best hotels that are being recommended to you, from Australia to Argentina and from Africa to the most remote part of Asia. Hotels that are dog friendly or near kayaking sites, adults-only properties and former monastery hotels are only few of the choices available.

Another advantage of Travelmyth is the fact that the top choices and not the cheapest deals are being presented. After recommending the best hotels, the travel engine compares prices from several booking sites to make sure that you book the best hotel at the best available price. The hotel search engine also tries to explain why each hotel is being recommended, the important information that the demanding traveler wants to know. For example, if a user searches for castle hotels, she can find information such as when the castle was built and its history. Just like the travel agent who tried to help you plan memorable holidays before the internet took over.

Travelmyth was recently featured on The New York Times where Stefanos and John are presented as whiz kids and friends since high school (and now 35 years old) who started their first company as college freshmen in 1998, when the internet was still an unknown world for Greece. Since then they have averaged a new project about every other year. Some have succeeded and some have not, but through it all they have made enough to support themselves while reinvesting in their business.

At another recent interview at Travel Massive, Stefanos and John said that Travelmyth is the 8th startup they have built, so they used their experience to save time and money while building their product. As they both write code, the first step was to write the algorithm that ranks hotels, and then they had to build the user interface to then add content. In the meantime they have closed partnership deals with online booking sites such as Booking.com, Expedia and Venere, to be able to offer price comparison and monetize their service.

Last October Stefanos and John traveled to San Francisco for the eTourism Summit as TravelMyth was one of the 5 travel startup companies selected as “Bright Shiny New Objects: Promising New Products, Tools And Apps”.

Travelmyth was launched in October of 2014 and is now gaining traction mainly in the UK and Scandinavian markets. I’ve already added Travelmyth at my favorites since it was in early beta version and I use it for recommendations when I search for hotels. As the search results match with my interests, it really helps me to discover hotels that I might not have found at other hotel search engines. Give it a try at travelmyth.com!