Always Book Direct
There is absolutely no advantage to booking with aggregators like Expedia or Hotels.com
By their own admission they are just “a third-party intermediary with travel providers such as hotels, car rental agencies, and airlines”. How could adding an intermediary with questionable customer service possibly make things more efficient? They need to pay their staff, web designer, social media person, programmers, and more after all. Ever see an Expedia commercial? Who do you think paid for that? Ultimately, you.
Now that’s not to say their sites don’t serve a purpose. Let them serve as a search engine. Find your flight or hotel on their site and then go book that same hotel or flight directly. This increases your odds of an upgrade.
Expedia and their ilk may often have the same price as the hotel or the airline but that’s a flawed business model – how do they make any money on those transactions? They do it by strong-arming the company to sell the flights and rooms to Expedia at a discount. If the company doesn’t play ball they lose out on a lot of potential customers.
The effect of this is that these companies don’t look favorably on Expedia customers. The professional ones will never let you see it, but I’ve been in many situations with both airlines and hotels in which something was denied or restricted because I had booked with Expedia. If you book directly with the company at the same price the airline or hotel has a healthier profit margin. They like this, and so they’re more likely to like you.
Put yourself in their shoes. People are checking into a hotel and you’ve got a fancy room that hasn’t been booked. Do you offer that room as a free upgrade to someone who booked directly with your company and has some measure of brand loyalty or do you give it to the person who let Expedia take a cut and is more likely to book solely on price? Loyalty wins the day.
Some hotels and airlines refuse to play ball so when you’re searching on Trivago you might not see them. Some airlines don’t put their most discounted fares on these sites so you might not be getting the best deal or seeing all the options.
Also don’t be fooled – Trivago isn’t trying to shake up an industry. Expedia owns Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Trivago, and VRBO. None of these are upstart innovators, they’re all the same corporate empire. An empire that made $11 billion in 2018 on hotels and airlines without owning a single hotel or airplane. They haven’t so much as made your bed.
So, as they are a giant corporate entity feel free to use them for showrooming. That’s right, just like the folks who look at the TV in Best Buy and then buy it on Amazon look at the hotel on Expedia but then book it directly. Score one for the little guy. Okay, Hilton isn’t exactly little but at least they built that hotel, cleaned up your room, and have a vested interest in providing excellent customer service so that you’ll stay with them again.
Expedia wants to make money by inserting itself into the process and offering not much more value than a google search. Their “why” is to make money, I prefer companies whose “why” is to get you from city to city or give you a great place to stay when you get there.
