I am thinking of taking my good lady away for a few days to a nice UK hotel
- having given up on an easy carefree foreign holiday to Lanzarote.
What gets the best deal - these agents like Booking.com, Trivago, etc or negotiating directly with the hotel?
Our flexibility of dates could be a good negotiating tool.
I use Booking.com to seek somewhere out, but so far it's always been cheaper to then book via the hotel (unless there is a block of rooms set aside for Booking.com, when I guess there might be no room at the inn).
In these parlous times, I'd rather give the hotel my money.
Booking for a few days in Brighton soon. What's difficult there is finding somewhere to park the car that doesn't cost at least one arm andf leg.
I believe that a lot of them have deals that say they cant be on a website (even their own) for lower price than on booking.com etc, But if you find out the booking.com price and ring up, you can often get a better deal (as they wont have to pay the booking.com commission)
The booking.com and similar sites commission is about 14%, which is enormous. However you can often get a goodly amount of that back via Topcashback or Quidco.
IMX the price on hotel websites is often higher than the booking.com price, but as you say it's possible to cut deals with the hotel direct. (particularly things like 'I'm travelling for business and my expenses only allow me X per day, do you have anything'?)
Theo
or you can simply get 10% back by being a regular user of the site
Well dont go to brighton then
Go woke, go broke
Seconded.
The phrase coined by someone on the old uk.transport NG (when it was in significant use) was:
"If my car isn't welcome, neither am I and my money".
I used to have to travel to Brighton frequently for work. Even in the residential suburbs, on-street charging applied and there was an unpleasantly uncomfortable feeling of being watched all the time.
Nothing would drag me back to Brighton in my own time and at my own cost.
It's my home town, and I have people to visit.
That said, I know a few local tricks to help out...
I used hotels all the time before I retired. Booking 200+ room nights each year for a sales team. My formula for the best deal is use Trivargo, choose the hotel, then call direct to the hotel. This invariably gave better rates, particularly with independent hotels.
Mike
I found Trivago to be useless
It offered such a short list of hotels at whatever destination it was, I had no difficultly getting a much better deal with one of the "normal" booking sites (obviously at a hotel that Trivago hadn't offered)
perhaps I should have tried Trivargo :-)
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