It’s a wonderful thing, the internet. Just when you think you know all its
tricks and turns, you discover something new and marvellous it can do. Did
you know, for instance, that the next big thing in online travel is software
that compares hotel rates on booking sites? This may not sound earth-
shatteringly exciting, but believe me, it is — because if you’ve ever booked
a flight with a no-frills airline, then looked on the web for a hotel, this
is going to save you a whole lot of time. It’s also going to save you a
whole lot of money.
There are already a few excellent websites, such as www.traveljungle.co.uk and
www.skyscanner.net, that compare online air fares. Type in a destination and
your dates, and they’ll sift through dozens of other sites to find the
cheapest, delving deep into computer reservations systems to get live prices
in a process known as “screen-scraping”.
Now this technology is being aimed at the hotel market, allowing independent
travellers to scour the net for the cheapest rates in seconds: a process
that would previously have taken hours. And while air fares on the web tend
to differ by a few pounds, the price of discounted hotel rooms can vary by
more than 50%.
Let’s take an example. Suppose you are inspired by the news that Ryanair has
just begun flying from Stansted to Seville. You might snap up a couple of
cheap flights, then decide to look for a hotel. The simplest way to do this
is by clicking through from www.ryanair.com to www.ryanairhotels.com. Let’s
say that, having saved on your flights, you decide to treat yourself to a
stay at the five-star Alfonso XIII, a 1920s palace in the city centre. The
price for two nights on the first weekend in June? A princely £815,
according to Ryanairhotels.com.
A little more than you planned to spend? Indeed, but you’re not the type to be
easily deterred. So you start searching the internet for a better rate,
quickly discovering that there are scores — maybe hundreds — of websites
offering to book you a room at the Alfonso. Trawling through them will take
all night.
Instead, you go to a price-comparison website called Kelkoo (www.kelkoo.co.uk)
and type in the name of the hotel and your dates. In less time than it takes
to sharpen a pencil, Kelkoo has found a lower price for the same two nights.
And not just a bit lower — when we conducted this particular experiment, it
directed us to Opodo (www.opodo.co.uk), which quoted £514.
This is getting interesting, isn’t it? But there’s a small caveat. There isn’t
just one super-duper website that compares online hotel rates, there are at
least half a dozen — and because they each trawl a different set of sites,
they tend to return different results. Sometimes wildly different. To find
out which is best, we put them to the test.
The experiment
HERE’S THE deal. Imagine you’ve bought flights to Barcelona with EasyJet
(www.easyjet.com), again for the first weekend in June. A link on the
airline’s website promises “The cheapest hotels on the web!”. You know by
now to be wary of such claims, but let’s try it: you’re directed to
www.octopus4easyjet.com, where you find a promising little two-star, the
Santa Marta, near the Barri Gotic, for £139 for two nights. The question is,
can you find the same room cheaper elsewhere?
www.cheapaccommodation.com
Formerly the sister of the popular www.cheapflights.co.uk, this site claims to
compare deals on 200 accommodation providers. You can’t search for a
specific hotel — you have to choose a city and the star category you are
interested in. We found the Santa Marta without any trouble; the cheapest
place to book, it said, was www.alpharooms.com, at £72.
Great — but when we clicked through, the price had risen to £110.63. We were
then asked to click again for a live quote: now £115.78. Still cheaper than
EasyJet, but the process was irritating.
www.kelkoo.co.uk
This site is well known to internet shoppers — it’s whizzy at finding cheap
household appliances such as fridges and DVD players. Now it has moved on to
hotel rooms. Kelkoo is simple to use, and you can specify a hotel or ask the
site to make its own selections. It came back with two results: £113.36 from
www.hotelclub.co.uk, and that £110.63 on www.alpharooms.com, which, of
course, turned out to be £115.78.
www.tripadvisor.com
Tripadvisor is an American site that promises “unbiased reviews of hotels,
resorts and vacations”, as well as price comparisons. It is nothing if not
exhaustive. Asked to search for hotels in Barcelona, it came back with 404
results listed in order of “popularity”. You can also specify a particular
hotel, then select which of five sites you want it to search. We ticked all
five boxes.
Irritatingly, each search result popped up on a new page, and we then had to
type in the dates again, five times over. Once that was done, however, the
prices looked good. One of the best, at www.hotels.com, was £89.62, but that
was without taxes. In order to find how much the tax is (7%, taking the
total to £95.89), we needed to hand over our credit- card details. More
hassle.
The lowest price was £82 (including taxes) at www.hotelpronto.com. This was
£57 cheaper than the quote we found through EasyJet. Remember that EasyJet
promise — “The cheapest hotels on the web!”? Hmm, perhaps not.
www.nextag.com
This site looked almost identical to Kelkoo, but came back with different
results. It quickly identified the Santa Marta and quoted £94 for two nights
with www.hotelclub.net. It also told us that 98 users had reviewed the hotel
and awarded it an average score of 3.5 out of 5.
Encouraged, we clicked to book, only to find that the price was for a single
room. A double would cost us £118 — 44% more than our cheapest quote. No
thanks.
www.traveljungle.co.uk/hotels.php
We expected big things of TravelJungle, one of the best sites on the web for
finding cheap air fares. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to deliver the same quality
on hotels. When we asked for hotels in Barcelona, we were presented with an
over- whelming number of results — 146 in all — with little advice on how to
choose. It took a while to find the Santa Marta, buried down the list.
According to TravelJungle, it would cost us £140: the highest quote of all.
www.hotelscomparison.com
Our final site claims to find the best rates for 125,000 hotels in 1,800
destinations. Users can search for a specific hotel, or type in a city or
resort and see what turns up. What makes it stand out is the way it displays
results, showing the spread of quotes for each hotel from cheapest to most
expensive, all with taxes included.
It found the Santa Marta in seconds and came up with six prices: the most
expensive was £143 with www.totalstay.com; the cheapest, the same £82 quote
from www.hotelpronto.com. By this point, we were fairly confident that £82
was the lowest price we were going to find.
The verdict
IT’S NO surprise that these websites are being tipped as the next big thing —
they clearly have the potential to save internet users vast sums. In our
test, the quotes differed by 70%.
All the sites we tested did a decent job — with the exception of Travel-Jungle
— but some were better than others. We liked those that gave us live prices,
with taxes included, laid out clearly on a single web page. We also liked to
be able to check rates at a named hotel as well as running a general search
of hotels in a desti- nation. Using these criteria, and taking into account
which sites saved us the most money, top marks go to
www.hotelscomparison.com, closely followed by www.tripadvisor.com and
www.kelkoo.co.uk.
Our only reservation in recommending these sites is that none seems to access
every hotel discounter on the net. To be sure you’re getting the best
available deal, you’ll need to run your query past all three of them — but
that should take no more than five minutes. It’ll be time well spent.
Is the net always best?
DON’T ASSUME that these new hotel discount sites will always come up with the
very best price. You should make two further checks before you can be sure
you’ve hit rock bottom.
First, check direct on the hotel’s website. In the wake of increased
competition from these discount sites, several hotel chains, including
InterContinental, Marriott and Hilton, are now offering best-price
guarantees on their own websites.
Second, bear in mind that in many cases, you can actually save money by buying
a package. This is because tour operators buy hotel rooms and air tickets in
bulk, negotiating lower rates.
The classic example is the bucket-and-spade beach holiday offered by
high-street giants such as Thomson, MyTravel and First Choice. Try to price
up one of those yourself and you’ll soon realise that you can’t undercut the
professionals.
If you’re after something long-haul but straightforward, check prices first
with a consolidator such as Ebookers (0870 010 7000, www.ebookers.com) or
Trailfinders (020 7938 3939, www.trailfinders.com). Consolidators have
access to inclusive tour (IT) rates: rock-bottom fares offered by airlines
to certain tour operators on condition that they are sold as part of a
package. That usually means flights and a hotel or flights and a hire car.
You can find IT rates advertised on the net, and book them online, but you
can’t access them by booking flights on one site and a hotel on another.
Even in the luxury market, tour operators offer value, because many five-star
hotels don’t sell rooms through internet discounters. For instance, book
independently at Sandy Lane, on Barbados, and you’ll probably pay the
hotel’s top-end rack rate. You’d get a better deal buying a bespoke package
with a specialist such as Carrier (01625 547020, www.carrier.co.uk), Elegant
Resorts (01244 897999, www.elegantresorts.co.uk) or ITC Classics (01244
355300, www.itcclassics.co.uk).
