Originally Posted by
dulciusexasperis
Equally, that a hotel will not match a price for an additional night's stay, that someone got on a third party site indicates what? It only indicates that they are bound by agreements they have with third party sites. In other words der_saeufer, they will not risk you telling the third party site they matched it and cut them out of the loop. It indicates nothing as to what they would offer a walk-in who has not booked through a third party. So, if I were to walk-in and say, 'I see this price on a third party booking site, will you match it?', the answer I get may be totally different from the answer you got. You're using a specific situation and then suggesting assumptions from that, there is no point to doing that.
I gave one easy example in which I knew what hotel the opaque deal site had given me... but I have tried to cut out the middleman on several occasions where I know or suspect that Priceline's "4* Hotel in East Cleveland" (lol) is the XYZ Hotel. I have been successful exactly once, at an independent hotel in rural Utah where the Priceline price wasn't that great anyway (IIRC, it was an $80 room for $60, which I got the clerk to sell me for $55--and he told me Priceline would pay him $45). In all the other cases, after hanging up with the hotel, I tap my phone a couple times and have a room at a price for which they wouldn't sell it to me. These are
always major chain hotels.
At an American chain hotel in a city of any size where the rack rate is $200 on a particular night, if you can get an opaque deal room from Priceline or Hotwire for $50, there is simply no way you're going to get the hotel to match that, no matter how much or how little information you give whichever employee you talk to. And those rates do happen--weekends in sleepy business districts, weeknights off-season in resort areas, etc.
My suspicion is that the chains are involved to protect their "image" so that it looks like there's less variation in room prices than there actually is.
Now, that said... when it comes to reserving rooms in a specific, identified hotel, I've
never been able to beat the price from booking direct in the United States. If I want to stay at the XYZ Hotel in ABCville, the best price is always what I get from calling the hotel or using the chain's own website.
Originally Posted by
pinniped
(1) Zero percent chance I'm haggling with a Hampton Inn clerk in East Podunk Nebraska over a hotel rate to try to save four bucks. I don't have time for that.
So much this. As a (formerly) frequent guest at lots of the hotels of rural America, I hit up Google, the opaque deal sites, and the chains' websites. Before I had a good smartphone and before widespread 4G data, I used to search with my beater laptop on McDonald's wifi with a coffee. If I got to the end of the coffee, I booked the best deal I'd seen and called it an afternoon. I'm not rich, and I'm definitely cheap. But I'm neither cheap enough nor poor enough to lose sleep over having paid $10 more for a hotel room.