Third party sites like Kayak can be helpful when trying to figure out where to stay. But The Daily Beast warns that using a third party site to book may result in higher rates.
Image from sebastianrittau
According to The Daily Beast:
Online travel sites can be a huge help when trying to streamline multiple reservations. But as a top-hotel employee explains, “If you are just reserving a room, you’re getting the short stick.” Third parties often charge more than the hotel’s actual rate. One more reason to book directly; if there are vacancies, they’re willing to bargain.
If you book directly through the hotel, you can skip the third party site’s inflated prices. Plus, the hotel may be willing to negotiate with you. For more tips on hotels, check out the full post via the link below.
12 Hotel Secrets by Hotel Staffs [The Daily Beast]
Comments
2 responses to “Skip The Third-Party Sites To Get Cheaper Hotel Rates”
Also, booking via a third party booker normally gets you the “worst available” room – Most reservation agents assign corner and bigger/better rooms to anyone with Award status first (even if they’re low or zero points), direct bookers, third party booking sites last.
Always worth finding the lowest price, then calling the hotel (or booking at the on-site rate and using their low price guarantee for Starwood etc)
I recently left a resort that advertises through expedia, booking,com and agoda. For my resort we had to pay commissions of over $800 a month to get these bookings. The rates we provided to those sites were the same or higher than that of our actual website to stop people doing the stupid price match thing. So it definitely pays to book direct. I disagree on the bad room thing though. Our policy didn’t say anything about it but we all personally would give people who booked over the phone or via our website a better room because we were cutting out paying a commission. But with expedia and all those websites the biggest trick to get a good room is ‘BOOK ONLINE THROUGH EXPEDIA THEN CALL THE RESORT TO CONFIRM’ We just get an email and in every case it would auto allocate to the next available room. If you call you get it moved to a nice room, SIMPLE 🙂
As far my understanding third-party sites have per-negotiated rates for the hotels. Recently I booked the hotels from this site http://www.travoline.com, and when I visited the hotel I was surprised the cost was too high, when compared to that of what I booked. I came to know only when I wanted to extend my stay in the same hotel.