Finding Bangkok’s Best Hotel Prices
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Booking a Bangkok hotel online is easy, but ensuring you get the best price less so. HotelsCombined.com is a useful site that lets you quickly see what price different hotel booking services are offering for a particular hotel.
[NB: This is a sponsored article]. The number of new hotels opening in Bangkok continues to rise and rise, and with the ever greater amount of hotel rooms also come bargains if you know where to look. The main problem is how to find them online - there are so many generic hotel booking sites it's hard to get a grip on which ones offer the best prices. Travelhappy uses two hotel booking services - R24 and Agoda - which are both competitively priced and have a good range of Bangkok hotels for all budgets. (These services pay me a commission each time a hotel is booked through Travelhappy). I've also started selectively linking to hotel price aggregator HotelsCombined.com for hotel reservations. It's a pretty useful service that's a bit like what Kayak.com does for flights.
Search for a specific destination and dates and the HotelsCombined site will come back with a list of available hotels which you can sort by Popularity, Price, Star Rating, Location, User Rating and Name. Choose a specific hotel and HotelsCombined then goes off and retrieves the price offered for that specific hotel from around 30 different hotel booking services - pretty much all the major ones, although it doesn't feature my favourite, R24. That way you instantly get to see what the best price available is for the hotel - and the prices can vary pretty dramatically. You can then click through to the relevant hotel booking website and make your booking. The interface for doing this is well laid out - you get the sense of understanding the info on each page very quickly and it being obvious what to do next. There's a lot of information to organise and the site prevents it from looking cluttered.
Of course, what HotelsCombined doesn't have any control over is the ease of use of the actual external hotel booking sites it links through to, so while locating the best price might be easy, making the booking might not be quite such a breeze. Some customers may prefer to stick with an individual hotel booking site that they've registered with and used before so they don't have to go through the booking process again. Real bargain hunters will have no such qualms.
HotelsCombined provides hotel info likes room photos, maps, a general description, and reviews, although quite a few hotel listings have spartan details, while others have hundreds of reviews. If they managed to improve this so that every hotel listing had a full complement of details it would be hard to fault the service - as it is, on hotels with sparse listings clicking through to several of the hotel booking sites might be the only way to make an informed decision.
HotelsCombined's tagline is "one site to search them all", punning on Lord of the Rings - they're not quite there yet, but they've made a very intelligent stab at organising the confusing welter of hotel information out there and delivering a service that genuinely helps the customer. If they can expand their coverage and increase the amount of detail about each hotel they list, this site could become essential.
Other Travelhappy posts of interest:
- HotelReservations.com Review
- Eurobookings.com: Site Review
- Bangkok Hotels: The Davis Bangkok
- Hanoi Hotels: Some Suggestions
- Christmas in Thailand: Booking A Hotel Isn’t Easy Anymore
