Getting the Best Deal From Online Travel Search Tools
Just type in the word 'travel' to your favorite search engine, and you will be inundated with travel search tools asserting that they can get you the best deal. There are more and more online travel search engines springing up on the internet every day.
There is no doubt that using travel search tools for hotels, flights, and car hire, can save you money and time. But it is important to remember that when you use a travel search, you will only be searching amongst the hotels, flights, car hire and other travel-related businesses that the search company has established contracts with.
If you are looking to get the best deal, you will need to search across a selection of travel search engines to ensure you are looking at the broadest cross-section of travel companies to buy from.
To try this out for real I selected ten hotel search engines from which to book hotels in Sydney, Toronto, Paris, Cape Town and New Orleans. The same check in and check out dates, and the room requirements were entered into the search engines.
A count of the hotels offered revealed that just over 60% of the hotels were common to all the search engines, mainly the big hotel chains. Of the remaining 40%, only half the hotels were found on more than one search engine.
The best deals found regarding price were those hotels unique to one or two of the search sites.
The same exercise was repeated for the flight search engines. Some of the flight search engines could not provide flights to the destinations selected, on the days that were input into the search engine.
Many of the travel search engines provide facility to find hotels, flights and car hire. When these search engines were used to hire a car, it was apparent that the best deals could be seen by going directly to the car hire company offering services direct, at the destination.
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