A warning about booking hotel rooms on the internet.
People often wonder why booking rooms on the internet is sometimes more expensive than booking at a travel agent.
Here I will explain why.
Hotels will generally sell their rooms in one of the following ways
- To travel agents
- Over the internet
- Face to Face
Travel Agents.
Quite often hotels will have rooms allocated to travel agents in advance whether they have a customer or not and hotels will often receive a lower rate and always pay commission to have travel agents booking their rooms.
Most of a hotels business will come from travel agents and a hotel I worked in, in London got 85% of their customers from one travel agent in Tel Aviv.
Selling their rooms through travel agents has the lowest profit margin for hotels but is the majority of their business.
Face to Face.
Hotels are really only trying to sell any excess rooms that havent been booked by a travel agent or on the hotels website face to face. On many occasions this is the best chance you have to get a low rate for your hotel but of course there is no guarantee you will get a room.
So this is best done in low season. Another problem you can face is if its a difficult location to get to, a hotel will know that you are less likely to walk out than if there is another hotel next door and consequently they will ask you to pay a higher rate.
Some better hotels will ask ludicrous sums of money (rack rate) if they think there ia a chance that you will pay.
The Internet.
The hotels website represents a much lower cost to the hotel to gain customers than by travel agents but in most cases the turnover is low. So hotels treat this as the cream on the cake and do not pass on the lower cost to the customer. In fact the cost is quite often much higher than by going through a travel agent.
Here is an example I will use as I was just costing a holiday that Im thinking of taking to Phuket.
High room rates on the internet are very common for Thai Hotels.
The hotel is the Sunset Beach Resort - Patong Beach, Phuket this is an example and I have only used this hotel because this is the package that I was looking at.
This is the cost of buying the flight and the accommodation on the internet.
Singapore Airlines/Silk Air Flight Adelaide to Phuket
A$1193
Sunset Beach Resort
8 nights @ 3000B = 24000B which is A$911.00 with no breakfast.
Total $2104
Here is the Travel Agents deal
Flight and 8 nights Sunset Beach Resort plus 1 night in Bangkok and free breakfast
Total $1059
HALF THE COST!!!!!!
Now its not an identical deal because with the travel agent you fly to Bangkok and spend the night there, you get an extra night but you spend more time in the air.
But this happens all the time you can see the cost savings that can be made by going through a travel agent.
This isnt always the case but you must shop around for the best deal or you can be stung.
