Booking a hotel: What you should know to pay less

Online reservation services answer an expectation of travelers: simplifying their search with the guarantee to be able to cancel.

But is the service really free and is it really a good deal for the traveler?

I book with a reservation service: is it free?

Yes and no.

Whether booking.com or Expedia or any other online reservation service, no services are charged to the customer. However, a commission of about 20% is charged to the hotel. Thus, the price is passed on indirectly by the hotel to the customer in the presented price.


Are the prices quoted on reservation services the cheapest on the market?

No. They are at least equivalent but often more expensive for a service that is likely to be lower.

Hotels now have the opportunity to offer lower prices on their website but also to offer exclusive special offers.

By booking directly with the hotel, the traveler is assured of getting a better price than booking on a reservation service's site.

It will also be more likely to be upgraded: If higher category rooms are unoccupied, the hotel will naturally be more open to upgrading the customer who booked "directly."

 

Do the selection and presentation order of the hotels correspond to qualitative recommendations by the services?
No, not quite.
For example, a well-known service implicitly presents their "favorite" hotels. The presentation depends on the hotel's commission rates and not the customer rating. Moreover, some services display a symbol in front of a particular hotel, a thumbs-up for example, which is charged to the hotel for each reservation and is in no way related to a recommendation by the service based on an objective rating of the hotel.


Dois-je faire confiance aux disponibilités de chambres annoncées par les centrales ?
No.
The hotels can choose when they will open the sale of their rooms to the reservation services they decided to partner with. They must respect the "availability parity": The momentary suspension of the distribution of rooms to reservation centers must be effective for all the services. Thus, the hotel may therefore appear full to the traveler while the hotel may have rooms.Furthermore the words "only 1 left on our site!" which can be seen on some reservation sites reflects only the reserve that the hotel decided to open but does not match the total available reserve.In summary if you want to know the hotel's actual availability, you will want to do a mock reservation on the hotel's website

Is the reservation on the site of a service flexible?
Yes. This is the strong point of reservation services: the ability to easily cancel but the hotel offers the same flexibility at the same price because it has no reason not to.

In the end, who to give the money to?
In the end, who will the traveler want to give his money to? Is the smart traveler not the one who benefits from the reservation services to make their choice of hotel but books directly on the hotel's website?

A traveler visits on average 22 websites before booking a hotel or there's a risk of canceling. It's now the traveler who "does the work" instead of the travel agencies that no longer exist.

It's also the hotel that "does the work" by managing itself the configuration of its account and distribution in the various reservation services and, of course, the maintenance of the hotel, the management of its staff, preparation of its rooms, service to its customers...

For the reservation service, the job requires two main skills: 

 

Everything else is carried out by market players, hotels and travelers.
Now time for you to decide.