Example Hotel Search
In this example, we are going to look at just a few hotel booking sites, and use a four night stay during the Christmas holiday season in New York City, booked about a month in advance. Several of the travel aggregators and online travel agencies are commented on in our Example Flight Search page, so we will just do a few here.
Hotelscombined.com
Hotelscombined specializes in hotels, and does not have the other searches such as flight and car rentals. They were established in 2005, and are headquartered in Sydney Australia. Their system searches over 700,000 hotels deals from around the world, and have over 2 million reviews and 2.4 million hotel pictures.
An easy to use web site, it collects information, and refers you to the booking site. You can sort the results by items such as price, hotel name, star ratings, or input a price range. In our example, it found a total of 414 hotels, with pricing information on 284 hotels. The prices in this example ranged from $26 a night to $1361 a night.
Travelaxe.com
Travelaxe is another site that specializes in hotels. It is easy to input your data for your search, and the 196 results with pricing information in this example came up on one page in an easy to follow table format. Clicking on the headers of any column sorted the column for quick review.
This site has the added feature of booking the room directly for you, like an online travel agency does. Maps, reviews, and other information on the hotels are available. In out example, hotels were listed from $95 a night to $2000 a night. The pricing column does not list nightly rate, but rather the price for the total stay.
Tripadvisor.com
This site is easy to input your data, and returns the results ten at a time sorted by Tripadvisor’s popularity index. To find out prices, it opens multiple browser windows at other online travel agencies.
If you want to search hotels in a large city by a popularity score, this site may work well for you. But to quickly get the overall scope of what is available, and what the prices are, this site is somewhat unwieldy. The site seems to be better at providing information and giving advice about the area you intend to visit.
Bookingbuddy.com
This is a travel aggregator with the full arsenal of options travel deals to search for, including hotels, flights, cars and cruises. The data for your hotel is input in one place, and then you choose the site you want to check from a large list (i.e. Orbitz, Kayak, Hotwire etc…). It does not run multiple searches simultaneously, and this is a disadvantage. But if you want to handpick your searches after inputting your information in just one place, this site could work well for you.
Summary
There are many good sites for finding travel deals on motels out there, but the differences between them are more striking than the sites used for seeking information on flights. For sites specializing in hotels, hotelscombined.com and travelaxe.com are very easy to use and understand while providing a lot of options. Some of the web sites mentioned on the Example Flight Search page such as Kayak do a great job as well.
