Hotel Reservation
Best and Worst Hotel Booking Sites for 2021
Frommer’s regularly pits the top hotel room search engines and aggregators against each other to see which ones can find the lowest price. The new numbers are in—and we have a new winner.
The results were not what we expected.
Three types of hotel search engines
First, it helps to understand the playing field. There are basically three types of websites we use to find hotels: OTAs (online travel agencies); the hotels’ own websites, which may offer deals OTAs can’t match (and you should always double-check yourself before booking); and aggregators, or meta-search engines, which don’t actually handle reservations—they trawl both OTAs and hotel sites to return a compendium of results, then send you to your choice for booking.
We tested both OTAs and aggregators. Why include OTAs at all when there are aggregators that canvass them? Well, some aggregators aren’t nearly as good as they should be. In fact, one OTA on our ranking bested three aggregators even though all three supposedly included it among their results. You’d think aggregator results would find everything, but clearly, they don’t, and our ranking proves it.
How We Determined our Ranking
We threw 60 room reservation scenarios at the major sites to determine which found the cheapest rates and the most options. To start, we tallied the number of choices each contender could rustle up in six major tourist cities: Orlando, Boston, Rome, London, Bangkok, and Buenos Aires.
Then we tested them on the same four or five specific hotels with varying price ranges, focusing on downtown locations since that’s where leisure travelers tend to want to stay.
To make it fair, when multiple sites found the same hotel, we awarded points for finding the lowest rates for it—and subtracted points for returning higher prices than its competition. With these stats in hand, we used a complicated weighting system designed to see which site saved the most money most consistently.
So who succeeded and who didn’t measure up? Read on…
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