Baidu-owned (BIDU 0.83%) online travel search engine Qunar unveiled a luxury hotel portion of its website today. The new subdomain sports familiar hotel search features, but with a new design focused on attracting high-end customers.
Similar to hotel search on Qunar's main site, the new section, lh.qunar.com, lets customer research specific hotels and hotel brands. At the same time, customers can now search by a hotel's build date or renovation date, and by hotel amenities like gyms, swimming pools, and spas. The main difference comes with a new design with sleeker, larger pictures to showcase more than 2,000 high-end hotel partners to luxury and business travelers.
In the summer of 2011, Baidu became the majority stakeholder in Qunar after its $306 million investment.
