One of the most expensive item you purchase in your holiday is your hotel. You have many ways to save on this cost but it is not easy to find the optimum solution : staying in a place as good as possible while paying as less as possible. Even if your travel budget can land you in expensive and luxury hotels or you have already decided in which hotel you would stay, you would still want to find the cheapest of the rooms in these hotels or cheapest of the same room.
You may ask "what do you mean by cheapest of the same room". Surprisingly, the same type of rooms in the same hotels at the same dates are usually sold with different prices through different channels. The rack rate (full price at which rooms are sold to customers before discounts and usually the price at reception) are much higher than what you can find online. Don't underestimate the difference. I know a hotel in Singapore's Chinatown whose rack rate is 200 USD per night while the rooms for this budget hotel goes for 80 - 100 USD in online booking sites. But even the prices in online booking sites as well as discounted rates in some hotel's own web site are quite different.
An important factor effecting the room price is the negotiation power of the online booking site in the region. For example Agoda.com is traditionally powerful in Asia - Pacific region and they usually negotiate the best price in this region (and is also one of the best options to check first).
So if you are planning to book your hotel room online either you need to spend a considerable time to cross check prices on multiple web sites for multiple hotels or book a room and most probably pay more. Even if you do your time consuming cross - check you will probably miss out the prices on direct hotel sites (yes, occasionally these prices are better than aggregated booking sites).
The solution to this problem is simple. You can find cheap hotel rooms or the cheapest hotel rooms by using hotel meta-search engines. For example, hotelscombined. This web site is a meta-search engine which partners with all the most visited travel websites to build the world's largest hotel price comparison search engine.
HotelsCombined.com is not an online travel or hotel reservation web site. It searches the travel websites such as booking.com, hotels.com, agoda.com, in real-time to show travelers availability and the optimal hotel deal. You can then click directly through to partner websites to book. Its web site is served in 39 languages and 120 different currencies.
One of the most important feature of the web site is that it also aggregates data from hotel's own web site (for some hotels only). The direct web sites are usually overlooked by travelers in the expense of travel sites but they sometimes offer the best deal with significant discount.
You may ask "what do you mean by cheapest of the same room". Surprisingly, the same type of rooms in the same hotels at the same dates are usually sold with different prices through different channels. The rack rate (full price at which rooms are sold to customers before discounts and usually the price at reception) are much higher than what you can find online. Don't underestimate the difference. I know a hotel in Singapore's Chinatown whose rack rate is 200 USD per night while the rooms for this budget hotel goes for 80 - 100 USD in online booking sites. But even the prices in online booking sites as well as discounted rates in some hotel's own web site are quite different.
An important factor effecting the room price is the negotiation power of the online booking site in the region. For example Agoda.com is traditionally powerful in Asia - Pacific region and they usually negotiate the best price in this region (and is also one of the best options to check first).
So if you are planning to book your hotel room online either you need to spend a considerable time to cross check prices on multiple web sites for multiple hotels or book a room and most probably pay more. Even if you do your time consuming cross - check you will probably miss out the prices on direct hotel sites (yes, occasionally these prices are better than aggregated booking sites).
The solution to this problem is simple. You can find cheap hotel rooms or the cheapest hotel rooms by using hotel meta-search engines. For example, hotelscombined. This web site is a meta-search engine which partners with all the most visited travel websites to build the world's largest hotel price comparison search engine.
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| Sample hotels combined search result. |
HotelsCombined.com is not an online travel or hotel reservation web site. It searches the travel websites such as booking.com, hotels.com, agoda.com, in real-time to show travelers availability and the optimal hotel deal. You can then click directly through to partner websites to book. Its web site is served in 39 languages and 120 different currencies.
One of the most important feature of the web site is that it also aggregates data from hotel's own web site (for some hotels only). The direct web sites are usually overlooked by travelers in the expense of travel sites but they sometimes offer the best deal with significant discount.
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| Sample search result for Crown Plaza Singapore Changi Airport hotel. Note that the hotelscombined has also searched the direct hotel deals from hotel's web site. |
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