The hotel cannot offer a cheaper public rate than Booking.com or Expedia, even though they take 15% or more. The hotel has to include other perks not available or limit the availability of the offer to members. The aggregators can run promotions that discount the rates, which the hotel still covers the difference.

The hotel can offer a cheaper rate, if you are a member of the hotels’ free rewards program. All the chain hotels offer a discounted “members” discount price for reserving directly and saving them commissions.

In my experience, absolutely not. Unless sites like hotwire in which you don't know the name of the hotel until you pay.

It used to be so much cheaper to book an aggregator back in the early days.

Hotwire is still pretty good since the deals aren't advertised. But you are rolling the dice on whether your hotel * rating is actually accurate.

This is not really true any longer.

Every major hotel chain and many independent properties have "Best Price Guarantees" that, well, guarantee you'll get the best price with them.

Often if you CAN find a lower rate at an OTA, they'll give you some kind of incentive (aka an extra credit etc.)

Examples:

* Marriott - https://help.marriott.com/s/article/Article-22050

* Hilton - https://www.hilton.com/en/p/price-match-guarantee/

* IHG - https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/bwc-lp

* Hyatt - https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee

There are a few exceptions, such as Hotwire-style hidden rates, or rates negotiated for conferences and events, but displayed rates from places like Booking.com, Expedia and the like nearly always qualify.

These best price guarantees are all garbage, though.

They'll say that the room type offered on the OTA is different than the room type booked direct - even if it's the same room.

I stayed at the Kimpton Epic Miami. Paid almost $150/nt less through Priceline. Tried to use IHG's Best Price Guarantee and they said it's a different class of room.

$465/nt through IHG - https://i.imgur.com/nTdZTnM.png

$342/nt through Priceline - https://i.imgur.com/3jabBss.png

There's a lot of misinformation in this thread.

Certainly not all garbage, though IHG (and Hilton) are two of the worst. Marriott[1] and Hyatt[2] seem to be much more dependable, per literally thousands of posts on their Flyertalk threads.

BUT, the practical consequence is that seeing drastically cheaper rates on OTAs than direct booking is much rarer than it used to be.

[1] https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marriott-marriott-bonvoy/206...

[2] https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hyatt-world-hyatt/970090-hya...

Marriott did the same thing for me with the New Orleans Ritz. In their case, they said the OTA room isn't guaranteed, direct is, therefore, different class of room.

Do you actually have any experience with these best price guarantees? Because I've only tried a handful of times and every time I end up booking through the OTA.

Look how fast you walked back your initial claim:

> Every major hotel chain and many independent properties have "Best Price Guarantees" that, well, guarantee you'll get the best price with them.

> Certainly not all garbage, though IHG (and Hilton) are two of the worst.

That's no guarantee.

I just checked, our Holiday Inn here is 0.10€ per night cheaper on Expedia. That wouldn’t even trigger their best price guarantee (1% saving needed). But yeah, that is not worth it, I haven’t actually booked a hotel in a few years, so I guess things changed for the better.

edit: Of course, Expedia doesn’t even have Motel One which is a nice 50€ cheaper than the Holiday Inn, and that’s for their 2nd cheapest room.

edit2: Okay, actually this is pretty confusing. Apparently, Motel One website and Expedia have 2 completely separate contingents of available rooms. Some days I can get the cheapest room at Expedia with no rooms free at the M1 website, some days they don’t have any rooms while the medium room is available directly.

This used to be the case, and most people think this without ever actually confirming this while traveling. The hotels have been working hard to incentivize away from this mentality with very tangible perks for directly booking with them which makes them, as you put it “literally cheaper”.

All the major hotel chains IHG, Hilton, Marriott, and Wyndham, which collectively account for over 98% of hotel properties across their various brands, now offer best price guarantees. In order to do this, hotels are strictly enforcing that travel aggregators can not advertise below certain prices.

Now admittedly, there are still deals out there cheaper than the direct hotels such as Hotwire and Priceline’s “name your price” programs. But the trick here is that they aren’t advertising specific prices for hotels. They are hiding the exact location or price unless you go through an extended process, which usually means committing with your credit card number before revealing the location or hotel chain. However, even these have caveats as they often lack perks that hotels offer direct customers. Often they don’t even guarantee a room type.

Most commonly hotels are removing the perk of free breakfast from travel aggregator deals, but still reserving it for direct customers. Also, with only a few exceptions, most hotels now only offer points and loyalty programs to direct purchase customers. You miss out on these by using aggregators, which usually equates to a roughly 5-10% value. This trickles down to other perks like the likelihood of getting a room upgrade, which is generally nil when booking through a travel aggregator. Some travelers like me that have even modest loyalty can get guaranteed room upgrades when available if booking directly. Even with status you miss out on these by booking through aggregators.

So no, it doesn’t pay to use a travel aggregator. It’s great for discovery or maybe a quick last minute purchase, but generally it’s better to book directly with the hotel.

None of this mentions non-tangible benefits like the fact that if you have a problem with your room and you booked directly you are going to find the problem getting corrected much quicker, easier, and better because the hotel can resolve the problem themselves. Disputes when you book through the travel aggregators requires you to call the aggregator. Which then, like the woman in this story, requires them to make you wait while they call the hotel and play phone tag back and forth, rarely yielding positive results.

"Most commonly hotels are removing the perk of free breakfast from travel aggregator deals, but still reserving it for direct customers."

I'll be honest, this is a perk I've seen advertised alot but never really understood. Maybe I just don't stay at good hotels or something but the breakfast I've always seen is a open bar with like coffee, milk, orange juice, cereals, toast/bagel, breakfast sausage, some fruit and a waffle iron. Is that really worth more than like 5$? Is it even worth factoring into the price of a 100$+ a night stay? Almost feels petty on the part of hotels to say no you can't have this bowl of offbrand cheerios and milk

It's $5, plus the convenience factor of finding somewhere to have breakfast in an unfamiliar city when you probably just want to get on with your business trip/holiday.

I don't doubt though the pettiness of hotels; I've seen way too many pictures of "this water bottle is free if you have Quadruple Osmium status with our loyalty programme, or $3.50 added to your bill otherwise."

Just feels like you could throw a handful of oranges and oatmeal packets in your luggage for the same experience til you find a grocery store. Like it's nice they have it but specifically pushing or pulling it as a perk? I guess I've just never felt that rushed. Your probably right on the pettiness of hotels though.

The concept might work, but I've never seen a regular hotel that provides a meaningful set of dishes. So if you made oatmeal, you'd have to do it in a coffee cup and try to drink it, or carry cutlery with it.

TBH, that's the perk I want in a hotel room-- a couple of sets of plastic silverware, so I can just bring back a takeaway (or leftovers) at the end of the day and be able to eat it without some comical scenario like trying to use plastic straws as chopsticks or smashing my face into a bowl of Pad Thai.

> So no, it doesn’t pay to use a travel aggregator. It’s great for discovery or maybe a quick last minute purchase, but generally it’s better to book directly with the hotel.

And yet:

$465/nt through IHG - https://i.imgur.com/nTdZTnM.png

$342/nt through Priceline - https://i.imgur.com/3jabBss.png

> All the major hotel chains IHG, Hilton, Marriott, and Wyndham, which collectively account for over 98% of hotel properties across their various brands, now offer best price guarantees.

The claimed Best Price Guarantees are all junk.

> business travelers book the hotel directly

Business travellers almost exclusively book through travel agents, not directly.