VMworld EMEA 2011 Hotels
I have to say, I really have not enjoyed using the VMworld 2011 website. For VMworld US I managed, but when it came to booking a hotel for VMworld EMEA, I was totally floored.
Booking through the VMworld website, I was presented with a list of 39 (yes, 39!) different hotels, each with an address, a price, a pop-up description, and a link to an individual PDF (yes, PDF, and yes, 39 of them) with more details on each hotel.
That meant wading through 39 individual PDFs, opening 39 map pages (in Bing Maps, no less), and trying to sort out where they are and what they cost. Ugh!!
Well, what sort of übergeek would I be if I let that slide?
So, I did a slow-and-dirty Extract/Transform/Load (ETL), and mapped the addresses into a great mapping tool called batchgeo. This is a really fantastic (cloud-based) tool using the Google Maps API and other great open tech awesomesauce.
Check it out below or directly at at this link. You can also download the Excel spreadsheet I created to do the mapping from this link.
Hopefully this will help you deal with this a lot more easily. Maybe VMware can do this for use next year (hint hint!!)?
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