booking.com - beware

[Tarquin Farquhar]

Try http://www.otel.com - turkish site but does well for us in our Germanic trips - we got a suite in the hotel Berlin, in, err, Berlin for 30 Euro a night - honesty I could have lived there for ever!

Strange, I plugged in Darmstadt, and it asked me on the next screen to select from the matching destinations, in or near. But in French it said

Nous avons trouvé 7 destinations correspondant à vos critères

and in English

We have found 4 destinations matching your criteria

But in fact it had found 5: 1 "in", the town itself, and 4 "near". Confused.


I use HRS (http://www.hrs.com), which I have found sometimes to have lower prices than hotels.com, my other useful site. It also has more options (sort by price, distance from a point, etc) and shows more info (free internet, etc).

[MPwannadecentincome]

Booking.com and laterooms.com do not set the price. The hotel manager put the rate on the Internet. Booking.com and laterooms.com are paid direct from the hotel. Payment for the rooms are made direct from the punter to the hotel. It is not commision based not are the rooms marked up. Blame the hotel...

ah that makes sense, also might explain the note on the hotel saying 'last room left'!

I use hotelscomparison.com for that kind of thing.

cojak thanks for the tip - unfortunately did not seem to cover the suburb I wanted, well its difficult to tell from 20 pages of results with no way of sub-filtering them.

Try http://www.otel.com - turkish site but does well for us in our Germanic trips - we got a suite in the hotel Berlin, in, err, Berlin for 30 Euro a night - honesty I could have lived there for ever!

I could not get this to work for the suburb I needed.

[Spacecadet]

Hotels and flights are two things that I always check direct with before booking online through a third party.

These websites have to make money somehow

[stek]

Try http://www.otel.com - turkish site but does well for us in our Germanic trips - we got a suite in the hotel Berlin, in, err, Berlin for 30 Euro a night - honesty I could have lived there for ever!

[Paddy]

Booking.com and laterooms.com do not set the price. The hotel manager put the rate on the Internet. Booking.com and laterooms.com are paid direct from the hotel. Payment for the rooms are made direct from the punter to the hotel. It is not commision based not are the rooms marked up. Blame the hotel...

[cojak]

I use hotelscomparison.com for that kind of thing.

[crack_ho]

Plan B foiled again.

[MPwannadecentincome]

I'm researching hotel prices in a small suburb of a large city in Germany. Booking.com has the hotels listed at prices higher than the rate quoted when phoning the hotel direct.

Not only that, they have the cheek to claim the rate shown on the site is below the normal rate, e.g. 450 euros crossed out down to 321 euros.

To top that they have a best online rate guarantee, if there is a cheaper deal elsewhere they want feedback on it. So I gave feedback on the real rates that apply over the phone.

bloody rip off merchants.