Eurobookings.com: Site Review
Does Eurobookings.com promise of no reservation fee for online hotel bookings make it a good choice for your next internet hotel room purchase?
Eurobookings.com have bought a review of their website on Travelhappy through ReviewMe! - and it's a pity they only cover Europe, because I'd be interested in trying out their service for own trips around South East Asia.
It's pretty hard to differentiate a hotel bookings website unless you have some great price offers available, but Eurobookings.com does make a good first impression by stating "No reservation fee - no cancellation fee - no payment in advance!". I have to say, paying in advance is a bete noire of mine for online hotel booking, as I have discovered the hotel to not bear much resemblance to what was described online on several occasions. As such, I try hard to avoid paying any more than a deposit online now unless I'm sure about the place I'll be staying.
With this welcome policy, the rest of the Eurobookings site operates pretty much as you would expect for a hotel site. I found the page layout not particularly intuitive or immediate - it required a bit of thought and effort on my part to navigate to hotels in East London for example. Your mileage may vary.
The front page search facility on Eurobookings.com is pretty hopeless. Enter "East London" and you get a list of locations like "London" (500+ hotels) and "East Kilbride" (30+ hotels). Enter "Shoreditch" - a fashionable district of East London - and you get a seemingly random list of London hotels that are nowhere near Shoreditch. Enter "tower bridge" and it will ask if you meant "Tower Bridge" (i.e. capitalised)... and then deliver a list of hotels near Tower Bridge in Ireland but not mention anything about Tower Bridge in London.
If you can get past the search and navigate through clicking down into the hotel lists, you'll find standard hotel info pages with photos and accommodation. There's nothing particularly good or bad here - it's the same info you'll find on most hotel sites.
However, when I went to the randomly selected Crownwall Hotel in London, I noticed stated the following:
"Reservations must be cancelled 2 days in advance of your arrival date. In the event of a no show or a cancellation in breach of this policy, an amount equivalent to one night accommodations will be charged. The hotel reserves the right to pre-authorise credit cards prior to arrival. "
That would not give me much confidence in Eurobookings.com statement that there would be no cancellation fee. Perhaps this is left over text from a standard listing that doesn't apply to the Eurobookers site - but once you've handed over your credit card details, it's a lot harder to win an argument about money you owe to a hotel, irrespective of the policy of the booking site.
However, the no deposit policy is still a good one, and while I think it's a bad idea to say they have the "lowest prices" on their site as it's difficult to guarantee such a thing with hotel rooms, Eurobookings.com is worth considering as one of the booking agents you consult online the next time you want a European hotel room.
Other Travelhappy posts of interest:
- Finding Bangkok’s Best Hotel Prices
- HotelReservations.com Review
- Hotel Review: Saint Gregory’s Hotel, Shoreditch, London
- Staying at The Sukhothai Hotel, Bangkok
- Perhentian Islands, Malaysia: A Quick Guide
