15% or more, depending on how many icons you want to be drawn next to your hotel name. So, with most small and medium hotels that don't have a detached hired team of managers, you can find a direct e-mail, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and get a manual booking with 5-7-10% discount. Of course, all booking services prohibit such unequal discounts in their agreements, but it is unenforceable, as the hotel can invent any complex reward system for anyone at any time. Booking services know pretty well that their profits depend on eyeball domination, that's why they buy all the ads everywhere, and flood the web with “official” hotel pages in numerous catalogues. Hotel website is pretty much always lost below those. Of course, big hotel networks with their own marketing departments and unique partnership agreements with public and corporate services work differently, and the price you get is what they already want from you.
What is trivially detectable, though, is cancelled bookings that result in immediate unavailability of the same room for the same period. If you book through a service first, then try to get a discount from a hotel, there is a much higher chance that you get “Naaah”. No one would really bother about a single case, but your case might not be that single case.
As for “booking guarantees” given by a “big, well-known service”, read the fine print in the user agreement. It the hotel that is responsible for everything. A decent hotel treats all visitors equally, and tries to double-check for possible problems in advance. A shady place that only needs to get by for a season or two, inflates scores by squeezing positive reviews, and overbooks isn't really afraid of losing a contract. Moreover, that doesn't happen instantly, because booking services get money from commissions, and want their numbers to increase, not to decrease. Also, Booking.com office for some area is, most likely, 3-5 people handling papers and making calls during work hours, they won't personally swat the place to help any client.
Bigger hotels tend to have a reservations team. Not every hotel will give you a better offer than whats on booking but depending on how you'll put it on your email etc yes you do get some discount against booking.com. Don't forget that a hotel has to pay 15-20% fee on the booking at booking.com and also has to deal with booking.com's rating system afterwards.
For me so far its worked everytime I am emailing the reservations team at a hotel. (I am in their trade though and tend to use my business email when booking)
I reckon phoning a hotel might be harder to get you a discount because most of the times the frontdesk staff won't put you through to the reservations rep because he might be unavailable or whatever so they'll just give you whatever price the system tells them which is what you'll get on their website if you go to book directly. Its important to be able to contact the person that can amend the booking prices and frontdesk staff usually can't do that.
That's a standard from industry that you will still get from most traditional hotels, unless you book them at a no cancelation discount rate through booking.com.
I do this very often, sending an email yields 5%-15% discount on booking.com prices. But that works for independent hotels. What I write here about are chain hotels, which have terrible online experience and contacted through email gave me 10-20% higher prices than online comparison sites (which also include commission for the site).
I booked for a noticeably (~10%) cheaper price directly through a hotel website, but I wasn't able to get just a room. I had to book a package which included free tickets to a nearby tourist spot.
> 99% of the time, you’ll get the same or better deal by booking online with the hotel directly.
This is often repeated but I almost never find it to be true in reality. Particularly for non chain hotels, best case scenario is their prices are the same as booking.com but if I go through booking I'll get points and future discounts. This tier is never cheaper booking directly. Chain hotels where I have a non base tier status will sometimes be cheaper but even then usually not.
I've spent ~150 nights in hotels in the past year, and it's super rare that booking directly is cheaper. I almost always save like 30% on Hotels.com/HotelTonight/etc.
I recently wanted to extend a stay and the front desk quoted me $120/nt while Hotels.com was $107 (plus 10% back as a reward, so ~$96).
I wish that weren't the case because this is 100% true:
> never know what's going on and when anything goes wrong they just tell you they can't help you. Then the place tells you that they can't help you because you didn't book through them and they just point fingers at each other.
I've come to rely greatly on in-app ratings/reviews before booking.
Or the people handling bookings at the hotel have no discounting authority and don't care where you're booking from as it's not their problem anyway. "If you say it's cheaper on the Internet go book there!"
Every time I've called up the hotel directly and ask for a discount they say no, and tell me to use booking.com if it has a better price. After a few tries I've stopped doing it and just go with whatever booking shows online.
Booking.com takes an 18% commission. Only a severely incompetent business would refuse to give you a lower price in exchange for them not having to pay that 18%.
All the big franchises (Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, Choice, Wyndham) will give you a cheaper “member” price at their direct website. Being a member is free, it’s just like airline miles and you even earn points.
I use booking sites to find, look at and compare hotels. But I try to book by phone or E-mail. Often the hotel asks what rate are you seeing online and negotiations start from there. Except for the dark patterns I believe these companies are also known for channeling their profits to tax evasion paradises. Yeah, it might cost me a few minutes, but I don't book tens of hotels a year.
99% of the time, you’ll get the same or better deal by booking online with the hotel directly. (Airfares, I’m less sure - the proliferation of hyper segmented economy and fees make me dubious about what the actual all-in cost of any given flight is.) And the other 1% of the time, calling the hotel will get you the same (or better) outcome or you’ll find out straight from the horse’s mouth they don’t actually have any availability for the room you want, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief upon arrival.
Yes! 15% for marketing, payment and secure booking is not expensive. It is actually very cheap.
And for us consumers services like hotels.com are really a great help, makes bookings fast and constistent. And they are secure; making me not worry about booking a hotel in an unfamiliar country.
The base issue is that the fees that agencies/aggregators like booking.com are (IMHO outrageously) high, in the 15% (a minimum that I believe very few hotels pay) up to 25%-30%.
On average, it is something like 18%-20%.
To have a term of comparison, in the old times when travel agencies existed, the fee was more in the 5%-10% range.
Small hotels must submit to them to have any visibility on the net, and (I believe it depends on countries, in some the clause has been deemed as invalid) the contract states that the hotel must not expose to the net (on its own site) a price that is lower than the one on the aggregator.
Hotel chains might have the visibility and resources to bypass this perverse mechanism, and even if they pay the lowest fee of 15%, in times of low margins every fraction is important.
What is trivially detectable, though, is cancelled bookings that result in immediate unavailability of the same room for the same period. If you book through a service first, then try to get a discount from a hotel, there is a much higher chance that you get “Naaah”. No one would really bother about a single case, but your case might not be that single case.
As for “booking guarantees” given by a “big, well-known service”, read the fine print in the user agreement. It the hotel that is responsible for everything. A decent hotel treats all visitors equally, and tries to double-check for possible problems in advance. A shady place that only needs to get by for a season or two, inflates scores by squeezing positive reviews, and overbooks isn't really afraid of losing a contract. Moreover, that doesn't happen instantly, because booking services get money from commissions, and want their numbers to increase, not to decrease. Also, Booking.com office for some area is, most likely, 3-5 people handling papers and making calls during work hours, they won't personally swat the place to help any client.
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