travel republic vs laterooms - uk hotel

balletshoes

okay, without your knowledge of the hotel industry, purely as a customer, here is my latest booking for room only in France - on the hotel's own website the cheapest price is 251 euros -

http://bookings.vi-hotels.com/wbe/AdjustStay.aspx?hotelCode=FRPADRC&bookingState=Modified&uid=f85a

on travelrepublic its £164 now (and I booked it last week for the same room spec/dates/party size for £140) -

http://www.travelrepublic.co.uk/accomodation/hotel-availability-details.aspx?hguid=e927e776-2e8a-45bc-a4e5-38b30bc95c09&id=374848&selectedCurrency=GBP

now, I don't know the reason why, and to be honest I don't really care. All I know is I've used travelrepublic in the past for hotel room bookings and had no problems at all .

basill

My experiences with Travelrepublic have been excellent. My first booking was for the Novotel by the river in Budapest, cheaper than anyone else and I did have a good search around. That price included breakfast, no one else did.

Also for an internet company I think their customer service is good. I filled in the requests field on the website asking for a river view and got a friendly phone call. River views were available but at extra cost, not surprising but nice to get the option.

We have used them several times since for flights and hotels and always had a trouble free trip.


B

hcb42

the french example looks like it is a combination of rate exchange issues not being updated and perhaps tardiness on behalf of the hotel, as I said in my first post. (This is the UK thread incidentally...)They also seem to sell package rates when not part of a package, something they have been to court over in the past. so yes, great if you can get the rate. Tested a few hotels I know in my region, some are identical, others are hard to compare because of the package pricing they are using, some higher, some lower.

Personally, I would be sacked if I had allowed this to happen though! It is all lost profit and lack of strategy for hotel. No one wants to sell different rates to different providers especially in electronic channels - as all their contracts have clauses forbidding this, and hotels get emails almost instantly from people like expedi@ if this happens, demanding it is fixed. Plus clearly you do not have to have a degree in marketing to know that a hotel would rather have direct relationships with its customers, as this is valuable for future sales activity.

I always book direct for the reason I know I can wangle a comp upgrade though

ayrforce1

Just out of interest would you care to expand on the court case, as in what was the charge and the outcome.

hanbenq

hcb42 wrote: »

THis is why adverts like trivago are misleading, they imply they are cheaper than hotel direct, and they are not. In fact many of these TV adverts websites are driven from the GDS systems - so the price HAS to be the same on them all. For those that arent, there are specialist tools which allow the person in control to publish the same rate on lots of websites at the same time - to make sure they have parity.

How can trivago be misleading??? It's a comparison site and NOT a booking site (like Lastminute, Laterooms, booking.com, hotels.com, etc.)

I've used trivago a few times - what it does is search through all the booking sites to find the cheapest rate available based on your search criteria and travel dates...so it would display the laterooms price of GBP 235.00, lastminute.com of GBP 212.00, etc - obviously displaying the cheapest price at the top.

Trivago even provides the direct contact details of most of the hotels directly on the trivago website - so you can (if the hotel allows) book directly with the hotel.

skooshhotels

You should expect to see different prices for the same hotels on different websites. Travelrepublic and Laterooms are direct competitors. It is not a flaw - it's called competition.

cmw1212

Sorry to bump an old thread but seems better than starting new one, I booked a hotel today through travel republic but looking at other sites they all have it for nearly twice the price so feeling a bit anxious now, if I turn up with booking conf and have paid they have to honour it?