Trivago to Launch Hostel and Shared Room Search

Trivago, the Germany based metasearch site that's been advertising heavily in the U.S., next week plans to debut globally a feature enabling users to focus their search on shared rooms.

The feature will be displayed prominently on the search results page under the price slider when bargain-hungry users sort the hotel search by price or when they set the price slider to $50 or less.

In both cases, they will see the option to "view deals for shared rooms."

Introduction of the feature admittedly isn't earth-shattering in itself by any means, but reflects the increasing popularity of alternatives to traditional hotel stays -- including hostels, apartment shares, apartment hotels, vacation rentals and other twists on the traditional hotel stay.

For example, in addition to category-leader Airbnb's assortment of accommodations, apartments are Flipkey's fastest-growing category.  Tujia.com, a vacation rental site in China with some parallels to Airbnb, just raised $100 million.

Getaroom.com's hotel choices in New York City now include "shared-bath hotels." And, Booking.com and Kayak already include a filter for hostels, which are attracting guests of diverse demographics.

Trivago's new shared-room search reflects this demand for alternatives to the traditional hotel stay.