August 25, 2016

Safety Index is a unique feature of FindOptimal

When you visit a new city, do you worry about safety around your hotel? I have two young daughters. Every time when we have a family trip, my wife always asks me to find a hotel in a safe and nice neighborhood. But how do you know possibility of crimes around a hotel and how good the area is?

Search with Safety Index

FindOptimal provides the neighborhood safety information for each hotel in the United States. When you define your scoring profile, you can select Neighborhood Safety as well as other demographic index, such as Population Density and Income per Capita. You can define a safety condition as Fare (safer than 50% of areas in the United States), Good (safer than 75% of areas) or Very Good(safer than 90% of areas). If you mandate such a condition, you will only see hotels with higher than the score in the search result. Alternatively, you can assign a value to each point of the index (Value per percentile). For example,  let’s assume the safety indexes of two identical hotels A and B are 71% and 70%, respectively. If you assign $10 to each percentile, hotel B will only be ranked before hotel A when B’s price is $10 lower than A’s.

Safety Index Heat Map

Data Source

Our data expert collected all statistics information from the U.S. Census Bureau. As for the unique Safety Index or Crime Index, we adopt a sophisticated mathematical model built by a Ph.D. and leverages multiple years of crime data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).  In addition to the overall Crime Index, FindOptimal also indexes crimes related to property and crimes related to person. The first category covers arson, burglary, auto theft and theft while the second category covers murder, rape, robbery and assault.

Safety Heat Map

The safety information is not only available in the format of numbers, but also available visually in the map view. FindOptimal has a couple of map overlay comboboxes on the map view toolbar. When you select a Crime Index or a demographic index from the overlay list, you will see a heat map layer on top of the area in which the target hotels are located. Isn’t that cool?