There are thousands of hotel booking sites online – does HotelReservations.com have what it takes to stand out from the crowd? Unfortunately, no.
I’ve been asked by ReviewMe.com to review the online hotel booking website HotelReservations.com. I get paid for writing this review, which I consider payment for giving my honest opinion rather than writing some turgid marketing flim flam. The thing with HotelReservations.com is that, while they have a killer domain name which probably brings them a lot of traffic, there’s nothing to set them apart from the thousands of other hotel reservation websites out there.
After a brief browse around the site, which offers hotels in most popular destinations around the world – including my current home town of Bangkok, Thailand – it’s obvious that Hotel Reservations is pretty much the same as most other hotel booking sites that you’ll find searching for hotel rooms on Google. I have every faith that HotelReservations.com will let you safely make a booking, securely debit your credit card and ensure your booking is honoured at the hotel – but frankly, in 2006, this isn’t enough anymore to make me prefer one hotel booking site over another. This is the bare minimum I as a customer expect – but I definitely want more from a hotel booking site than that. I want trustworthiness, clearly labelled, non-tricksy pictures of room types and amenities, concise, accurate information, and a list of pros and cons.
Booking hotels online, like booking flights online, is still fraught with uncertainty, despite both industries generating millions of dollars each year. I travel a lot and book all of my flights and hotels exclusively online – but everytime I go to a new destination, I find myself scouring different sites trying to find the best price for the same flight route and hotel, which differs wildly from website to website. This lack of transparency is extremely frustrating. Even aggregator sites like Fare.net the excellent TripAdvisor.com [aff link], which has thousands of reviews both positive and negative by people who have stayed in the hotels listed, have only a clunky price comparison mechanism between the likes of Hotels.com and Expedia.com, neither of which are usually the cheapest place to book a room online. HotelClub.com offers fairly keen prices and also has instant confirmation on some hotels, which is very handy if you’re booking last minute.
Most hotel reservation sites run off some arcane hotel industry database, where the data is presented to the user in a fairly haphazard and not particularly friendly way. This same info used to be the preserve only of the travel agent, who was trained to decipher it. Now us customers have to figure it out for ourselves, and not many hotel booking sites have found a way to streamline and summarise the information from those hotel databases into the most appealing way for ordinary Joe customers like me to understand.
HotelReservations.com uses the booking engine from travelnow.com. It doesn’t have a particularly friendly browsing process – it quotes initial prices without including local taxes and service charges, which can be up to 20 per cent extra; its text is all a uniform grey 10 pt small size that’s hard on the eyes; photos of the hotels and their amenities are similarly tiny until clicked on, but none of them are labelled, so you don’t know what photo is of which room. This is a common problem amongst hotel booking sites and one that must cause them to lose a lot of sales. The lack of labelling causes customer uncertainity and will probably lead to disappointment.
The principle of “the more you tell, the more you sell” definitely needs to be applied here. Just as TripAdvisor.com has become trusted as a hotel source because it has honest, real person reviews, so hotel booking sites need to do the same and start providing readers with as much information as possible to let them make an informed decision. A 20 second video clip that does a 360 view of the room stored on YouTube would start selling a lot of hotel rooms, I bet.
HotelReservations.com has no sense of taking a different perspective on online hotel bookings and trying to do them better – it has a “me too” feel about it, which makes it essentially mediocre. I could persevere with the unfriendliness of the site design if there were great prices to be had – but a quick check on a few Bangkok hotels I know, such as the Bangkok Davis, shows HotelReservations.com’s prices to be about a third more expensive than at Thailand-Hotel-Deals.com, the hotel booking service I affiliate with here on Travelhappy.
The bottom line is that HotelReservations.com has all the complex backend in place to take bookings, accept money and honour reservations – but if it really wants to make the most of the large amount of traffic it gets from its clever domain name, it needs to start standing apart from the crowd and enhance their site with clearer, better, more honest descriptions of the hotels they offer, with more straightforward pricing and less clicks to book them.
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TravelNow did a lousy job with my Thanksgiving reservations. When I arrived at the motel there was no reservation in my name. We had asked for a ground floor non-smoking room with a king sized bed with a senior discount. The motel had such rooms but none were reserved for us because TravelNow had not made a proper reservation. I paid more for an upper floor (no elevator) non-smoking room with two queen sized beds. When I contacted TravelNow the only response was “Gee, that’s too bad, better luck next time”. I would never use this disservice again and I am warning all of my friends,family, and acquaintances about how lousy their service and how poor their attitude is toward its paying customers. Use some other service or simply call the motel or hotel and make the reservation directly. I did not let their disservice ruin my trip but they will not have another chance at it with my money.