Second this. I built a similar site a year back and what I did was pull in the UK XML data daily (the feed was updated daily) and database that mother. I'm not

Second this. I built a similar site a year back and what I did was pull in the UK XML data daily (the feed was updated daily) and database that mother. I'm not sure how often Expedia updates its hotel prices, but you could maybe poll every couple of hours instead. We also had a free search for anywhere in the world, so we'd pop up a spinner and grab the XML. Then we'd cache that result set in the DB with a rudimentary script and store it for the next 24 hours. That would then be served to anywhere searching for the same thing in the meantime. Overall, it sped things up dramatically.