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Why Bargain Travel Sites May No Longer Be Bargains (backchannel.com)
Aggregators like Expedia have made us lazy -- and we may be missing out on the best deals. From a report on Backchannel: Most of us rely on metasearch engines, like Priceline, Expedia, or Travelocity, which typically use dozens (sometimes as many as 200) of online travel agents, called OTAs, and aggregators to find the best deals. (A metasearch engine and an aggregator are interchangeable terms -- they both scour other sites and compile data under one roof. An OTA is an actual travel agency that actually does the booking and is the lone site responsible for everything you buy through them.) We rely on these sites because we assume they have the secret sauce -- the most powerful search engines, tweaked by superstar programmers armed with the most sophisticated algorithms -- to guide us to the cheapest options. With a single search, you can feel assured that you are paying a rock bottom price. Over time, however, the convention has flipped. As competition among the sites heated up, the hard-to-believe cheap fares required some filtering. A too-good-to-be-true fare ($99 to Europe from California) usually came with a catch (the $400, indirect, ticket home). And as the business models that on which these aggregators rely are getting tighter, the deals are getting worse. How can you be certain you're getting the lowest quote? The short answer is, you can't.
Stop posting sense.
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This is why I bought an RV. The hotel industry is just full of scumbags. From hotels that don't give a shit about bedbugs (or just don't put in the money to have their rooms checked on a regular basis, or worse, think they don't exist) to hotels that think because the customer paid less they deserve a shit room, and then hotels that regularly walk customers, and bullshit resort fees to pay for non-optional things that were advertised in the pamphlet (without the resort fees... which are only mentioned on checkout), not even bothering to mention about the lack of cleaning in some places (where you can find 'free' illegal drugs and used needles), the hotel industry stinks to high heaven. Imagine if your car dealer decided you should have the scratched car with broken A/C because you managed to work out a deal where they just break even.
My RV is maintained to my standards, and campgrounds don't bullshit you. Most of them tell you the site number you'll get and give you a map. And if you don't trust it, google earth will help. And, even then, you can find somewhere to sleep free if they screw you.
The last few times I used priceline convinced me to get an RV instead of use hotels. Hoteliers just like you put me in total fucking shit rooms because I managed to haggle a deal on priceline. Enjoy one fewer customer. For life. And I'm not the only one, RVs are selling like hotcakes.
Not that the RV industry is producing quality products either, but at least everyone gets the same shitbox no matter what they pay.
When I search at the metasearch travel sites, they show me round trip prices. Do people book flights without looking at the actual price? If it seems high, try searching for two one way trips, and compare. Is that rocket science? Can people actually compare two numbers and determine which one is higher? Or is that too much to ask these days?
Quickest way to kill my loyalty is treating loyalty like a currency. I pay you for good service everytime. Not just for the times I present a magic "gimme decent service" card.
This is why I bought an RV. The hotel industry is just full of scumbags ...
All evil comes to the customer who books travel through third-party sites. Protip: there is not really any such thing as an online travel agent.
If your trip is too complicated to book directly through airline and hotel sites, go a real travel agent who has an office in your town.
The main use for them is an early filter. They'll give you a rough list of hotels in a particular area, sorted by price or rating. Then you can go and look at the hotels' own web sites.
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