> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Decisions to cast Tilda Swinton as a 'celtic' incarnation of the Ancient One, typically a Tibetan character, alongside the choice to move Stephen Strange's place of spiritual enlightenment and training from Tibet to Nepal, have created significant controversy online from those who argue that Marvel Studios is whitewashing Strange's backstory to better appeal to the Chinese government.
Propaganda doesn't have to look like a commercial from a tourism board.
50k followers, no new shots since February. This isn't a "rogue account" posting "inappropriate content."
Don't you think it is suspect that his account (no activity in months) is "flagged" on the same day the CEO blocks him on Twitter for legitimate chirps?
> In most hotels where I know a member of staff, they freely admit to having several 'worse' rooms which are given to booking.com/priceline etc guests first, regardless of availability.
You don't think Hotel Tonight is lumped in there with booking.com and Priceline? They're all OTAs. They're all treated the same.
"My experience using other booking sites for 'cheap deals' has been that you're often treated as a lower-tier customer, for example being given worse rooms (ground floor, no windows etc). The HotelTonight experience is the opposite. ~25% of the time, I receive a room upgrade without asking"
They're all OTAs. You're just as likely to get a "good" room with HotelTonight as you would with Priceline, Hotwire, etc. The quality of room you receive is mostly dependent on room availability and the check-in agent.
You can save even more if you use a cashback site when booking through Priceline, Orbitz, etc.
The Best Price Guarantee is largely a lie. It's a Best Price Guarantee on a rack-rate rooms. The problem is most OTAs will offer a significant discount (sometimes more than 50%) for a non-refundable room. The rooms are exactly the same, they just classify them differently, so they don't have to actually have the best price.
I bought (and returned) an XPS 13 9360 last year. Touchpad was trash - overly sensitive, skipped, unrecognized movements, etc. I understand part of that is software, but it's embarrassing how much better the touchpads are on Macbooks.
It seems all the trackpads got worse when they went button-less to copy Apple.
My workaround for this is to set up a dummy email address that I use for all travel. That email address then forwards the emails to both [email protected] and my personal email address.
