The holidays are coming, and the world is slowly healing from travel restrictions. Some of us are yearning for the chance to travel again. Yet when you search “best hotels in [insert destination here]”, you are met with a bombardment of information.
As you click through every website and platform, you are suddenly unable to move to the next step. How do you compare? Which platform is the best for what? And which is the safest?
In this article, we want to compare nine well-known hotel booking sites to look at the pros and cons of each site and provide you with the knowledge for you to make the best decision in booking the best hotel deals for you!
Types of Hotel Platforms
There are three types of online hotel platforms: Online Travel Agency (OTA); Aggregators/Metasearch Engines; and Direct Hotel Booking Sites, aka websites from the hotel chain themselves. In this article, we will be focusing on two categories of hotel booking platforms.
Online Travel Agencies are websites that provide a platform for all things travels related. They can range from flight booking to hotel booking to even booking tickets for tourist attractions. There are usually overlaps in what kind of services they offer, and some OTA platforms provide bundles (Agoda has flight & hotel bundles; KKday has hotel & attraction packages etc.)
The pros about OTAs, in general, are that they are the direct middlemen between you and your hotel chain. This means that transactions are much easier to make as all you have to do is use their platform to checkout instead of redirecting. They also tend to offer membership perks that allow you to save up on accommodation costs via deals, discount codes, reward nights, and more.
The cons of OTAs, in general, are that they only provide one price on that platform, and it is usually the price they set, which can be a hassle if your priority is to…