Late Hotels | Get Up To 75% Off Your Hotel Room Prices

Hotel booking websites come in three main types: the good, the bad and the bogus. By bogus I mean that they are not actual hotel booking websites at all, instead they are scam sites designed to trap the unwary surfer into clicking on links that will open up new windows all over the place. So avoid them like the proverbial plague; you can normally spot these bogus sites by the way they are designed to look like real room booking websites, but end up looking like the cheap imitations they are.

This page will save you money when dealing with hotel booking websites

Just so you know, this is a BLOG designed to help you get the best prices for late rooms, and not a hotel booking website. The best way I’ve found to find the best hotel websites is by Google searches (also Bing, Yahoo and whoever)  and by checking out online ads.

The good hotel booking websites (such as Laterooms.com, Octopus, Superbreak and a hundred more) have several important features that differentiate them from the bad hotel booking websites.

Good Hotel Reservation Websites  have…

• A clear, easy to follow entry page and search box
• A review section that include bad and not so good reviews as well as glowing testimonials. Even the best hotels have a bad hair day from time to time!
• Clear notification of what the price is for. Is it per person per day, or per room per day or per person for the entire stay, or per room for the entire, stay… ?
• No intention of charging you booking fees, local taxes or any other weaselly extras.
• Laid out procedures for when things go wrong, either with your booking or at the hotel.
• Clear contact details – if you’re paying by card, telephone and email support is the minimum. And is there a postal address?

Bad Hotel Reservation Websites  have…

• Plenty of cheap offers prominently featured on the front page but no obvious way of finding specifically what you are looking for
• Only positive, complimentary reviews. This means that they cull all the bad ones, which is not a good sign that they are looking after your interests above their own!
• Ways of making you think that you are paying less than you will actually be asked for.
• Sneaky add-ons when you come to check out. These can include the addition of local taxes (such as purchase tax, Value Added Tax, state taxes and so on), a charge for using a credit card to pay and (in some cases) for using a debit card. One or two of the worst examples will even charge a booking fee, which is unforgivable because the hotel will already be paying them a commission of what you are paying them. Be very careful!
• No regular procedure they follow in the case of any problem that may arise.
• No easy way to contact them. No telephone number, no address, no sign of where in the world they might be. People should have the choice whether they want to deal with a company that is based in some far corner of the world, away from the glare of media publicity and perhaps out of reach in case anything goes wrong with the deal…

It cannot be denied that hotel booking agencies come in handy, even if some of them are just there to take money off you.

One possible way of getting an even better hotel room deal is to look for  hotel room booking websites that specialize in the country or region you are traveling to. They will then be better placed to provide keen hotel rates than websites that only deal with global hotel chains. You’ll find that when you’re traveling to somewhere slightly off the beaten track, the only options available to you will be rooms in multinational chain hotels at multinational hotel rates.

When it comes to finding the best value hotel room, my advice is search online and compare the various options. Online ads are also a good way of seeing what’s available. Google, for example, are very stringent about who can advertise with them. Anyone who has a history of ripping people off or of offering bad service will usually be disallowed from placing ads on their network.

The best way to find local hotel booking websites is to search online, then check out links

To recap: it is very important that you look for hotel booking websites with care and that you take even more care before giving them your card details. In my experience, around a third of all hotel booking websites are good and reliable, offering a service they can be proud of; almost all the rest are almost OK, but not offering the best deals and prone to add on extras; and a very small proportion are rogue traders, just trying to get their sneaky hands on your hard-earned cash. To be honest these very bad sites don’t last long because their credit card providers (usually Paypal) and their hosting companies normally react very fast to complaints and cut them off. But their are more ways to be ripped off than having your credit card details stolen, so (in the words of a vintage TV cop show) “just be careful out there!”