If you are looking for a place to stay on your vacation or business trip the options on offer can be overwhelming. A hotel search tool allows you to instantly search and compare room availability and prices from sites like Expedia, Hotels.com, Venere, Laterooms, Agoda (and many more) all in one single set of search results. You could never cover the vast choice of hotel booking sites yourself, and so would more than likely miss out on the best deals. A great way to save time and money.
However, if you’re looking for a specific travel deal (hotel + flight for example) or a different type of accommodation (hostel or vacation rental) the following 10 best hotel websites have proven the most consistently useful for finding accommodation when traveling.
flickr/kevin dooleyExpedia.com – one of the largest web travel booking agency offering a variety of services include airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises and vacation package deals. You can save money by booking your hotel and flight together. It is based in the US with localized sites for 20 countries.
Agoda.com – great for deals in Asia but is also one of the fastest-growing platforms worldwide. You can earn points worth 4 -7% of the room price and apply these points towards your next booking.
Priceline.com – helps you haggle for the best bargains on hotel bookings (plus flight and car rental for that matter) in a casino-style way. Select the minimum star class, date of stay and preferred neighborhood, and then name your price. Certainly, deals aren’t guaranteed but you can save up to 60% off published rates. The catch: Priceline doesn’t tell you the exact hotel you’re booking until after you pay, so you won’t be sure exactly where you’ll end up.
Booking.com – the web most popular hotel reservation service attracting more than 30 million unique visitors each month from both leisure and business markets worldwide. It offers various accommodations types from small independent hotels to five star luxury resorts, with over 135,000 properties across 101 countries. Along with Agoda it is part of Priceline.com.
TripAdvisor.com – the most popular hotel review site on the web, They offer more than 45 million reviews of hotels around the globe. Ignore reviews on either extreme and just focus on the ratings in the middle to get a good sense about a hotel. The comments are not always reliable and the sources are not always credible. But you can find patterns in the comments that focus on quality, cleanliness and safety worldwide.
Hostelz.com – although probably associated with a bunk-bed lifestyle, many hostels offer more private, hotel-like accommodations these days. If you’re traveling alone you can save a great deal by staying at a hostel Hostelz.com compares all the hostel booking systems at once, including hostelbookers.com and Hostelworld.
LateRooms.com – as you may know, many hotels drop their prices at the last minute. It’s better for them to fill their rooms at a discount rate than have them unoccupied. LateRooms.com is one of the main outlets that hotels (as well as B&Bs and guest-houses) use to try to fill their empty rooms. Thy offer around 37,000 properties and promises discounts of up to 70%.
Hotwire.com – One of the best hotel websites for discount travel. Hotwire offers low prices on airfare, hotel, rental cars and vacation packages by selling off unsold travel inventory at discounted prices.
HomeAway.com – the world’s leading online marketplace of vacation rentals, with websites representing more than 625,000 paid vacation rental home listings throughout more than 145 countries. They offer short term home rentals as an alternative to hotels when traveling, an option which has seen rapid popularity growth in recent years. Home rentals are often cheaper than hotels and have more space but you have to do without a cleaning service or hotel amenities.
BedandBreakfast.com – perhaps the biggest bed and breakfast booking site on the web. Bedandbreakfast.com offers thousands of bed and breakfasts, inns and homestays lodges, cabins, historic hotels, small resorts and guest ranches worldwide.
