Booking.com now recommends hotels by passion, like gambling or stargazing

Booking.com, part of travel monolith Priceline Group, wants to sell you a hotel room based on what you like to do — not just where you want to go.

The company has soft-launched a new feature, called Passion Search, which recommends destinations and hotels based on interests like stargazing, spicy food, gambling, or mountaineering. According to Booking.com CMO Pepijn Rijvers, speaking on stage at VentureBeat’s Marketing.FWD conference, the company has “mapped 230 passions” so far based on “tens of millions of endorsements … sourced in the past 12 months.”

“We’ve made it part of our core search,” said Rijvers. For now only some people will see the feature on Booking.com’s homepage, a company representative told VentureBeat.

More, from Rijvers:

We have literally tens of millions of destination endorsements — I think the number was 23 million endorsements that we’ve sourced in the past 12 months. And there are many, many endorsements that we’ve gone into, like specifically neighborhood endorsements or … landmarks and stuff like that — and how well they fit to a certain passions. So if your passion is all about rainforests, then for us the next piece becomes what are the most recommended bush walks? Who are the most recommended tour guides? It’s the trajectory that we’re on.