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Hotel Price Comparison Sites: Still a Good Deal?

This article titled “Hotels: are price comparison websites still a good deal?” was written by Patrick Collinson and Beth Adamson, for The Guardian on Friday 15th April 2011 23.01 UTC

Laterooms.com promises hotel rooms at “unutterably low prices”. Lastminute.com guarantees the lowest prices, while Booking.com offers a “best price promise”. Yet when Guardian Money tested prices for a two-day getaway to Edinburgh over the royal wedding weekend they were nearly identical – and significantly more expensive than on rival comparison websites.

To test the hotel sites we selected three different hotels: a Sheraton in New York, a Hilton in Berlin, and a Malmaison in Edinburgh. We sought prices for two nights for two people, on the weekend of 29 April to 1 May.

The good news is that shopping around works. In Edinburgh, while the major booking sites all wanted £260 to £280 for two nights at the Malmaison, the surprise winner was Asda , whose hotel booking site found us the same hotel for £229.57 – a saving of more than £50. The price also included breakfast, which is unusual when most websites sell at “room only” prices.

Our survey suggests it is best to bypass sites such as lastminute.com, Travelocity or Expedia and instead go to websites that scan every travel website for the best deal. We found Asda’s cheap price on the Malmaison by going through travelsupermarket.com. It also found the cheapest deal at the Hilton in Berlin – the underlying provider was travelrepublic.co.uk – and at the Sheraton in New York, where the underlying provider was lowcostusa.co.uk

Hotelsearchengines.net and kayak.co.uk use a similar model, and also found us better value deals than Expedia and Travelocity. But it pays to spend time looking at two or more websites – although Kayak turned up decent deals in the Hilton and the Sheraton, for instance, it found us the most expensive room at the Malmaison. Examine carefully the prices quoted; some headline deals did not include tax or were for the wrong dates.

Generally, we found that going direct to the hotel’s own website failed to pay off – prices were the same as those charged by the big operators and higher than on the comparison sites.

The similar pricing by the Hilton and Sheraton hotels was striking. In part, this is because websites have common owners: lastminute.com is in the same group as travelocity.com; Expedia controls hotels.com, hotwire.com, tripadvisor.com and venere.com. Booking.com is owned by priceline.com.

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