an opinion posted on 1/29/08
We've had the ability to make reservations on our web site for quite a while, now. Even though people can make reservations right from our site, we still get a lot of people making reservations through other travel web sites. Since the contents of our reservations database is shared with them, the other web sites have the ability to see the rooms that we have left and the rates for those rooms.
Mostly in an effort to keep all of our rooms as affordable as possible, we do not offer our rooms through Priceline or Hotwire. If we were to do that, of course, the difference would have to be made up, somewhere. That's just how business works. I've worked with the two mentioned "discount" web sites in the past and from all that I've personally seen, they aren't worth the trouble that the hotels that use them have to go through. Of course, this was just my experience, and others may have had better luck.
I'm sure that you've all seen the Priceline commercial with Captain Kirk William Shatner "coming to the rescue" of a traveler that seems to be paying too much for a hotel room. The room starts out at something like $200 a night. After "negotiating", they finally get the rate down to $99 and everybody ends up happy.
Now, I've heard people joke about how businesses will raise the prices of things in their store before a big sale, and for the most part (in retail) that doesn't happen. When hotels are in the habit of taking such huge discounts from these types of web sites, though, it can happen. How many of the people reading this have "ever" paid $200 or more for a hotel room? Probably not a lot, since you're obviously looking for information, online.
The real point of posting all of this is to point out that the best deal that you will get from "any" hotel web site is by reserving at the hotel's own web site. Rather than looking for a good deal at a hotel you want to stay at by going to another site, try looking on the site, itself. You may be surprised by how much you'll be saving, in the long run. You can "start out" happy, rather than going through negotiations and "ending up" happy.
- Tom (Gladstone Auditor)
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