The Site: HotelRoom.com
- HotelRoom offers offers booking on 125,000 hotels in over 15,000 worldwide destinations
- Partners include major world-wide hotel chains, top-quality independent hotels, inns, motels, lodges and B&B’s.
- HotelRoom.com is owned and operated by Priceline.com Incorporated, which allows them to offer exclusively “negotiated” hotel deals.
- HotelRoom.com Best Price Guarantee – If you find a cheaper rate within 24 hours, get refund of 100% of difference
- Ability to book hotel now, and pay for it later
- No hotel change fees or cancellation fees, unless the hotel charges it’s own fees.
- Translation in 25 popular languages & currencies
The Good:
The HotelRoom website is super simple and uncluttered. They don’t have flashing banners to distract you, which makes finding a cheap hotel easy. We like that you can easily sort the hotel search results by price, guest rating, nearby cities, and the filtering options such as ‘Spa & Wellness’. You can also choose to see your hotel search results on a map, which is really cool if you are not familiar with the city you are traveling to. Our favorite way to display the hotel search results was by “Quick List View”, which we filtered by price to get the best deal in a jiffy. The speed and simplicity of the HotelRoom site is like no other. Okay, except Kayak, which brings us to…
The Bad:
It appears that HotelRoom is trying to emulate the simplicity of Kayak.com. That is good, however, HotelRoom’s pricing doesn’t quite make the cut. When comparing hotel pricing in major cities such as Seattle and Chicago, we found lower (or equal) pricing on Kayak. We were not able to find any cheap hotel rates that seem to be “specially negotiated” as they claim to have. Even when checking out the hotels flagged as “Special Offer”, we found the same price on Kayak.
The pricing displayed on HotelRoom does not always contain hotel taxes and fees, per their small print on the booking page: “You will be charged directly by the hotel for the ‘Total Estimated Charges’ shown… unless expressly stated, taxes and service fees are excluded from your room rate…. you will be charged applicable taxes, including, without limitation, sales and use tax, occupancy tax, room tax, excise tax, value added tax and/or other similar taxes, directly by the hotel you select“. That makes it a little hard to compare hotel pricing, as we often see taxes and fees upwards of $20+ a night. Further making price comparison difficult, we found that sometimes the “Filter by Price” button did not work. We think the HotelRoom site has some bugs to work out there.
The HotelRoom “Best Price Guarantee” is a bit weak. HotelRoom.com guarantees that if you find a cheaper rate on your hotel within 24 hours, they will refund 100% of the difference (only). That means that if you find a hotel for $10 less next week, you are out of luck. That also means that you only get the price difference of $10 back from HotelRoom. Yippee. We think the Orbitz Price Assurance guarantee* is much stronger. Orbitz will give you the price difference, PLUS another $50 to use on a future booking. In addition to that, the Orbitz guarantee isn’t limited to just 24 hours, and they will send you a check for the price difference if someone else books a lower rate without your knowledge. So far, we have not found any travel site that has beaten Orbitz’s guarantee.
The Fees*:
- BOOKING FEES – HotelRoom.com apparently does not disclose the specific amount of their service booking fees, or we could not find them. They keep a portion of what you pay for your reservation, “we retain as part of the compensation for our services and to cover the costs of your reservation, including, for example, customer service costs”. If the hotel charges any service booking fees, HotelRoom will pass that charge onto you. This is a reason why we typically recommend booking hotels directly with the hotel.
- CANCELLATION FEES – HotelRoom does not charge a change or cancellation fee, but if the hotel charges any change or cancellation fee, they will pass those charges onto you.
*Based solely on research done by TravelSiteCritic.com, these figures may be inaccurate and are subject to change. Double check before you buy.
The Deals:
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