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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.
I can tell you from working in the hotel industry... the lower priced rooms are the worst rooms. Either they're the most worn, something's wrong with the A/C, or they're adjacent to noise sources. A much better recipe for a pleasant hotel stay is to find a hotel in the general price range you're looking for, then go to the hotel site and select a room based on your budget.
I've found the best overall savings are if you stay loyal to your preferred airline or hotel chain. Get on their rewards card or miles / points system, and book directly through them. You get the best deals, and a lot more support if anything goes wrong with your reservation. Try getting help from an airline or hotel company if you book through a third party...
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
try booking a kid friendly cruise a year out during a school break, the prices are sky high because everyone is using big data and whatever to know when and where people are traveling. it's been this way for decades. In the 90's airline tickets to Italy would magically drop by 50% in October.
After priceline came out almost 20 years ago people learned to make money off the cheapskates. They will advertise cheap hotel rooms but those have the worst views of the garbage dump.
my inlaws thought they got a deal on a cruise one time and told me to go to some russian travel agent to book a room and take the kids. turned out it was a school week right before the Easter break
try getting a discount at Disney in July or August
Easy to get a cheap room in Vegas as long as you're there on Wednesday. Actually it's the best day since the place isn't packed full
same with cheap airline tickets and any other vacation. go outside the peak season. my wife and I had a good deal in Negril on our honeymoon cause we went in October. Downside is some things were closed and some tours not running cause of the lack of people
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?
The airlines use cookies and if you visit the same site multiple times they raise the rates on you. So look and then go to a clean computer to book it.
Whenever I'm looking for travel I browse first and when I decide I want to buy something, I open a Private Browsing window to search one last time for the item, to make sure they are not charging me more in the main screen... of course IP tracking could get around that but I've not seen evidence that happens yet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
is still email.
Great Idea, I'll send an email to Florida for my next vacation
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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