Online Travel Booking and Bidding Agencies - Sites that Regularly Beat the Hotel Chain's Site, other than PL/HW?

Other than bidding via Priceline or Hotwire, buying hotels through a package dealer, or negotiating with the hotel, I'm not aware of any sites/strategies for regularly undercutting the rates posted on a hotel chain's website. If there were other methods, I'm guessing the chains would modify their Best Rate Guarantees.

Problem is, PL/HW are not well established outside North America, except in a few world cities. I haven't found lastminute.com, latehotels.com, wotif.com (in Australia), for example, to undercut rates the chains and hotels post themselves at the same moment. Instead, they seem to function mainly as handy directories across all chains, in real time.

Has anyone actually found consistently favorable comparison shopping at sites other than PL/HW? Which sites, and for which countries? Please add details.

The best site I have found is www.hotelscombined.com . Kayak.com can also be good too. What these do is look across a bunch of sites and get the prices for various hotels. Then you can compare the costs and book at the site that is the cheapest for the hotel you want. It's quite common to see the same hotel for the same dates for $100 on one site and $200 on another (or a similar discrepancy).

You will still miss some very good sites. One that I really like is www.hrs.de . Another that can be very good is www.ameropa.de (only in German).

The best site I have found is www.hotelscombined.com . Kayak.com can also be good too. What these do is look across a bunch of sites and get the prices for various hotels. Then you can compare the costs and book at the site that is the cheapest for the hotel you want. It's quite common to see the same hotel for the same dates for $100 on one site and $200 on another (or a similar discrepancy).

You will still miss some very good sites. One that I really like is www.hrs.de . Another that can be very good is www.ameropa.de (only in German).

Will look into these, however, the multiple booking site displays that pop up with kayak.com and tripadvisor.com have not resulted in lower rates than the hotel chain's own site, in North America at least. It's easy to compare, because the hotel chain site is one of those to pop up.

By contrast, priceline rates are usually much less, and hotwire rates somewhat less. Again, these sites don't work too well overseas.

I mostly use these sites for Europe, and for Europe they work very well for finding great deals.

I mostly use these sites for Europe, and for Europe they work very well for finding great deals.

I just tried hotelscombined.com, and through gtahotels.com it did produce a much lower rate for a San Antonio TX Hyatt hotel than Hyatt itself. However, Hyatt refused to honor the rate under their Best Rate Guarantee because it's not immediately bookable. Apparently gtahotels operates on a voucher system, under which the specific hotel booked is not immediately assured despite the entry of credit card information. According to the company customer care representative, this company is headquartered in Turkey.

It's very common for voucher-based sites to be excluded from best rate guarantees, and not just for Hyatt, but it's not true that the exact hotel is not guaranteed in this case.

The representative came up with a good excuse, but it doesn't really make much sense. They should just say their policy is to exclude voucher-based sites (although in practical terms the sites do not differ in any significant sense from any other site that offers transparent prepaid rates).

The problem I've found with PL overseas is that the areas to bid for often include both good and bad streets and neighborhoods. This is much more likely than in the US since the old cities (eg. Paris, London) don't have the same concentration of development that we see in the US.

Also, there can be problem listings, like the Paris airport hotel on PL that is miles from the airport and offers no shuttle.

it is worth mentioning http://www.travelaxe.com, which also fetches rates from many other sites and allows you to see them side by side.

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IME it really varies depending on what hotel you're trying to book. For many years, the way to beat the rates on Marriott's official site was simply to go to any site other than marriott.com. Seriously - though in the last couple of years they've gotten better about that. In any event, with the big US-based chains, chances are all the travel sites are going to offer the same or similar rates - and they'll all either beat the ones on the hotel's own Web site or they won't.

If you're looking at locally-owned properties overseas, it gets a little more interesting. Lots of these places have specials that they only post to local Web sites, so it pays to find out what the popular hotel sites are in the destination country, and shop around. Years ago I got a few good deals in Amsterdam on bookings.nl - though that site now redirects to booking.com, which says it's part of Priceline. Other sites to try include that of the railway serving your destination country - the European rail companies are starting to get into the business of one-stop travel shopping - as well as the nearest international airport, which may provide a link to a locally-based hotel reservation service.

I got a good deal on Orbitz last week. It was an older Best Western where we had to go on 24 hrs. notice for a death in the family. Price was $18. a night less than the hotel or BW web sites.

You will still miss some very good sites. One that I really like is www.hrs.de.I like HRS.de because of the no-additional-charge add-ons that are often included in their rates. Recently, at a hotel in Stuttgart, the HRS rate included breakfast (€25,-), while the hotel website and other sites did not (for the same room type).

ANother interesting site is hotel.de or german version of I think Dutch based website hotel.com.

This may be a bit OT, but I find that the search engines miss the small guy, who often offers the most affordable, and perhaps only choice in a location.

www.motelguide.com is a useful listing of local "mom-and-pop" establishments.

Seems to be only in german, but I've recently started using www.mchotel.de for comparing. Similar to hotelscombined, but have spotted some a couple of good prices which I would ordinarily have missed. Careful with their easyclicktravel offers, lots of offered prices are higher when you click through

Update: Just did a comparison -- mchotel and hotelscombined are one and the same (at least they use exactly the same interface)

Two German sites that sometimes have really good rates are
www.dertour.de
www.ameropa.de

But they are only in German. With Ameropa.de, I was able to book it online and have vouchers sent to me in Canada. I don't know why they choose to snail-mail, but that's how it is.

For dertour.de, they don't have options for the USA or Canada (and probably some other countries), but I emailed them and they would have been willing to put it through manually.

Two German sites that sometimes have really good rates are
www.dertour.de
www.ameropa.de

But they are only in German. With Ameropa.de, I was able to book it online and have vouchers sent to me in Canada. I don't know why they choose to snail-mail, but that's how it is.

For dertour.de, they don't have options for the USA or Canada (and probably some other countries), but I emailed them and they would have been willing to put it through manually.

Very much agree about dertour. I have used them quite often, and obtained an excellent price for the Sheraton Royal Orchid last year. When all the US websites were quoting quite a bit more, we paid €88 per night for an upgraded room with breakfast buffet and an evening buffet for each 3 night booking.

Any down side to downloading their program?

it is worth mentioning http://www.travelaxe.com, which also fetches rates from many other sites and allows you to see them side by side.

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