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.
<a href="https://archive.md/tpqui" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.md/tpqui</a><p>At this point basically any third party booking should be considered a scam. Even if the booking company is "legit", you're still a second class citizen with the hotel or whatever you booked and subject to no help, arbitrary fees, no points, etc.<p>It's just as much scamming on the side of the hotels - they accept third party booking but misrepresent that they treat you the same.
Hostelworld has absolutely cornered the hostel market, with most venues signing away pricing. This allows hostelworld to equalize prices in a given location, raising them above board although occupancy is down (many empty places during the busy season) while the guests are focused in a few places (as lower rated places can't lower their prices). So for hostels, 3rd party booking is all that is left. Often, contacting them directly, they won't even know what their price is (while a few years ago they would give a discount to hostelworld, hostelbookers etc.)
The issue is agent v. merchant. Historically Expedia uses the merchant model (hood inventory, company as seller), and Booking used to prefer the agent model (no inventory, venue as seller). The former allows some advantage to what the company can offer but with added inventory risk, and means that the hotel doesn’t see you as “their” customer. With the agency model you do have recourse with the venue and will likely be a “normal” room to them. Unfortunately Booking is increasingly shifting towards the merchant model to find more profits.
This reminds my of the scams I encountered two weeks ago <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37447652">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37447652</a><p>I recommend booking in person you will save a lot.<p>In an extreme example: we booked part of a trip to Greece ahead of time and part on the spot. The in-person bookings were > 75% cheaper than the pre-booked stays, and the quality was the same or better<p>It’s not zero risk. sometimes a hotel will be booked and you move on. But if you appreciate a little spontaneity it’s very much worthwhile
The interesting thing for me is that a lot of people assume Skyscanner does what Google Flights actually does... Maybe a decade or so ago it was only an aggregator or maybe it was always a booking agent that just felt more transparent at the time, so no one noticed.<p>As an aside, Google Flights is a fantastic — but at least in my recent experience — prices for multi-city bookings are off by 10-20% then the price quoted by the airline. Enough to make me think the taxes are just omitted or calculated differently...
Hotel pricing tools are useless if they don't include arbitrary "resort fees" hotels can spring on you when you're standing in the lobby at midnight after a full day of travel.
Travel just sucks regardless. It feels like solving this problem is harder than putting people on Mars.<p>There are too many bad actors in the system, nothing is really standardized so customers can't compare or new businesses can't compete 1 to 1.<p>Its all scams at literally every level starting with "travel influencers" > booking sites > transportation to/from airports > the airports themselves > airlines > hotels and finally > the actual activities to do when you arrive. All layers are optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet.<p>As a CS person, this unoptimized situation really grinds my gears.