Booking a hotel room: How to pay less?

• Is the service really free?
• Are the prices advertised the cheapest on the market?
• Does the presentation and selection of hotels meet qualitative criteria?
• Is advertised availability reliable?
• Is it easy to cancel?

A service that costs 20% of the room rate

Relais Saint-Honoré - the Lobby

The room rate is often more expensive than the market

Hoteliers can now offer their customers lower prices than those they offer to reservation centres. Fortunately! What would justify a charge not paid by the hotel be passed to the client?
The hotelier therefore has every interest in clients who book directly with them, and offers lower prices for the same services. Furthermore, if the hotel isn't full, to whom will the hotelier offer an upgrade? A "reservation centre" customer, or a client who booked directly?

The selection and presentation of hotels does not meet any qualitative criteria.

Unlike online rating sites, reservation centres have no qualitative criterion for prioritizing the order of presentation of hotels. If there is a well-known centre that offers a presentation "Our favourites", it is only determined by the rate of commission paid by the hotels. The thumbs-up that can be found in front of a particular hotel with a reservation centre does not correspond to objective scoring; it is simply the result of a service invoiced by that centre to the hotelier.

Relais Saint-Honoré - Chambre Confort

Room availability must be verified by the traveller

There is no requirement that the hotel have a contract with a reservation centre to offer all its rooms on a permanent basis. Thus, according to the hotel's location, season, day of the week, the hotel will not always need a reservation centre to be booked up. It depends on who contacts them directly. However, if the hotelier decides to suspend the distribution of its rooms, they have to do so with all reservation centres. A hotel may therefore appear full, although on its own website or if contacted directly they do still have free rooms.

We also saw the words "more than one available on our website!" on some booking sites. That statement reveals that the stock that the hotel has decided to make available does not reflect its full capacity.The traveller will therefore be interested in visiting the hotel's website and simulating a reservation to find out the actual availability of the hotel.

The cancellation of the reservation is really flexible

This is indeed one of the strengths of the central reservation. But that does not mean specificity. Most of the hotels offer a 48-hour cancellation policy at prices lower than those observed through reservation centres and the terms are clearly written.

Since when does adding an intermediary lead to lower prices?

On average a traveller will visit 22 websites before booking one or more rooms. Is this the reservation centre that did the work for him?

But who updates the databases of hotels to offer the online service? It's not reservation centre, but the hoteliers themselves.

The web has opened the possibility of accomplishing what travellers think is an economic miracle. The miracle is that, today, it's enough to develop well advertised programs and deliver them to the market that will support them, creating a turnover that is often tax-free.Ultimately, isn't the smart traveller the one who uses information from the web to contact their own service provider?