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Comment by tallanvor | Hacker News Reader

“There had been this perception that to get the best price, you book through a different channel than going direct,” he said. “That’s never actually been the case.”

Yeah, that's a load of crap. I always start with an aggregator, and if I find a place that I like, I check their website as well. Unless they're cheaper or offer some major perks, I book through the 3rd party site. Of the last 5 hotels I've booked, going through a 3rd party site has been a better deal 4 of those times.

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A few months ago I booked a hotel for a trip. I checked the 3rd parties, found a hotel and then tried to go direct. HHonors claims the best prices online if you're logged in--it was the same as the booking third party (Groupon Getaways via Expedia), except Groupon gave 10% back in Groupon Bucks.

I arrived at the hotel, they noted my HHonors basic membership and mentioned I wasn't receiving points due to booking with third party. I said I got the room for 10% less than their best online rate and their response was that I should have called bookings to talk to them. So now there's even more hoops to jump through to book direct? No thanks.

I called a Hilton once after seeing the same place cheaper on HotelTonight, the woman said she couldn't match the rate... So I got it for the "impossible" to match rate (and the hotel paid a commission for the privilege!).

Price matching is great when it works, but infuriating when you can't actually back it up. It should all be automated, I can't imagine someone at Hilton is manually setting HotelTonight prices and not telling anyone.

Hilton is setting the distressed inventory price algorithmically and offering it to the GDS (or directly to HT), and no one local is empowered to override. You pay HotelTonight, They pay for your room with their corp MasterCard, and everyone is happy.

Some processes and business practices are super hard to change.

I know how HotelTonight works, but since they advertise matching the lowest price they should empower anyone doing booking to match the lowest price.

My mistake. I agree.

They are right.

Hotels will almost always match lowest rate because they care much more about having low vacancy and not having to pay booking.com for your reservation. And you won't sacrifice points or chances at upgrades.

Booking.com is a good way of finding low prices that hotels will match.

Hotel aggregators are best places to find low prices not booking.com. It's possible that Expedia family of sites have better deals which you won't see on booking.com. So TripAdvisor and Trivago are better.

Disclosure: Used to work at TripAdvisor.

Many hotels have contracts which ensure they can't undercut 3rd party resellers. The trick we used back in the day was to offer the same price on the hotel website while bundling in a bunch of freebees such as wine/dinner etc.

Exactly this. Working at a brand name travel aggregator (sadly now just a brand of someone else) this was always the gotcha for the hotel chain. We get a deal on your certain count of rooms and you can't undercut our price for the same class of rooms. In exchange for 15-30% we send you business. There are kinds of deals possible including us buying rooms from you and then reselling them ourselves (too risky really) or agreeing to buy inventory you haven't sold for today. I don't know the ins and outs of each type of deal, but for smaller hotels its great, for bigger chains its a pain, and for bigger chains with aggressive managers of certain hotels who ignore corporate rules, a tricky gambling act. In the end the price is too high for big chains, but the ease for consumers to compare is great. Same problem with airlines somewhat, they don't want aggregators but the general public wants to compare prices, and to accommodate them the airlines cheat on pricing (low ball the aggregate price and then charge for all sorts of stuff later - i.e. Spirit). With airlines its much harder to compare prices then with hotel rooms.

That explains my recent experience.

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.

The workaround (which I didn't see explicitly mentioned in the article) is that loyalty rates aren't included in those contracts. That is why the hotel chains are trying to push loyalty account signup and their own websites.

This is my experience too. After doing this for a while, I concluded that there's no point going to the hotel's website to check prices anymore, I just book on the aggregator now.

It's because a hotel will charge you as much as they think you'll want to pay. So the price changes if you look twice or through a different channel.

Try checking from your phone while it is disconnected from your personal network.

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