Best hotel booking sites
- Luke Telford
- 8 September 2009
Photo credit: cabedababe @ sxc.hu
For a site to really deliver, it needs to tick all the expected boxes and work in a way that distinguishes itself from the rest.
First, there are the workhorse sites like Expedia
and
Zuji. These sites are basically third party travel agent sites that
also book hotels, which does yield the convenience of being able to organise a flight and somewhere to stay at
the same time.
They offer a perfectly functional method of finding accommodation, but the local range is lacking slightly. Listings are presented as, well, a list, and are often too lengthy to encourage scrolling past the first page or so.
Both sites offer a comprehensive rating system (Zuji 5 point, Expedia 25), and, to their credit, listings can be ordered according to their rating or price, a fairly standard feature that does make browsing slightly less painful. Also, possibly owing to the fact that they are international companies, both sites offer much more extensive overseas options than their Australian competitors.
Quickbeds is a considerably more to-the-point service that is
specifically tailored to the Australian market. It belongs to the wonderful genre of last-minute hospitality websites that have emerged and rapidly proliferated over the last five years.
The idea is that hotels can't always fill rooms, and prospective customers may need somewhere to stay at late notice, so the two find a half-way point in the form of cheap accommodation.
The site has cleverly included a button in its search engine to specify either ‘last minute' (an immediate 28 day window) to ‘year round' prices, allowing customers to use the site as a simple straight-up hotel booking service should they wish to.
For the best range of possibility, it's difficult to ignore the larger ‘hypothetical, last minute travel plan' sites. If you're willing to keep an open mind about exactly when you need to travel and where you want to stay, sites like these prove to be invaluable resources.
The aptly named WotIf is the best known, and with good reason.
Customers enter their desired travel destination and date, and WotIf regurgitates an enormous grid of listings over a ten day window, along with their prospective prices, allowing direct price comparison between tens, sometimes hundreds of different
accommodation possibilities.
Inevitably, having to visually process all of the possible outcomes at once can be daunting, and the best fares are often snaffled up by obsessives.
If WotIf seems too much work, it might be worth paying a visit to LastMinute instead. It operates on the same principal as the former, but with fewer options, resulting in a slightly less overwhelming method of browsing.
And if you happen to be the type of person who becomes unsettlingly excited about organising itineraries, and you happen to think WotIf is for featherweights, give NeedItNow a spin. It's the same again, but much larger, focusing on hotels, but offering car hire on the side also. This site also caters
almost exclusively to the Australia and New Zealand markets, and covers only a handful of major civic hubs worldwide.
Overwhelmed yet? You needn't be. With these sites, some steely determination and a resolute clicking finger, you'll make the perfect reservation in no time.
