Have you ever used Trivago to book your hotel accommodations (https://www.trivago.com/)? We did a quick search and found that the prices didn’t seem any cheaper than other sites, but we might be mistaken. What do you use to book your hotel stays? Please comment.
Booking.com
Best but still little issues in arranging flight booking refunds.
I also use Booking.com but for accomodation not flights. I do not fly of recent times as we cannot afford it.
Booking.com
Lodging only. Genius Level 3. Used them for years. Find they outstrip everything I have tried before. Had only ONE issue in Wales one time and Customer Service bailed me out immediately right while I was in the lodging and talking to a disgruntled landlord at a B&B Every other experience has been great with super deals. Love the Genius 3 secret deals that appear occasionally!
ALWAYS look up and call or message the hotel/Inn that you want DIRECTLY, (unless concern with the veracity of an establishment) most will provide you with a lower rate for direct booking. The major booking websites are troubling on a number of levels. Some years ago, Two companies acquired ALL of the private booking sites. Thus, if you look, almost all of them are owned by Expedia (Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, Ebookers, CheapTickets, CarRentals.com, Wotif, Trivago, etc), or Booking.com (Priceline.com, Agoda, Kayak, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable). You will usually get the same rates from any of these, but occasionally one will discount its commission (to the hotels) to keep the illusion that they are different. They usually make requirements that individual establishments can’t advertise a lower rate.
They have created a monopoly on reservations to give you (the consumer) the illusion of having choices, but blocking out the small players. They charge a hefty commission (usually around 20%) to the actual inns and hotels, and don’t really provide you any service except for serving as a directory. If you have a problem, they just serve as a middleman to contact the establishment that you need to deal with, which you could do on your own with any reputable establishment.
We own a small inn, and we used to do much business through people who found us through a B&B directory. But Expedia bought it and dismantled it and it just points to their site. Now they function as a mafia that doesn’t own or operate any inns or hotels, but has bought up the internet, gives consumers a sense of choice for the 10 different websites to search, but then charges the inns ‘protection money’ in order to be able to connect to customers. Especially in busy locations, individual websites are buried below the listings of the big companies that specialize in SEO and spend on advertising so that you won’t find us in a general search.