Hotel Reservation Systems – are They Feasible, Reliable and Cheap?

Certainly, most of us, while planning a trip abroad, have been searching for possibilities to book a hotel online. Also most of us have found two options: (a) to book a hotel directly on the hotel website or (b) to reserve it via a booking system that has a certain online hotels database. The question stands “what option to chose?”. In this article we analyze the pros and cons of the global hotel reservation systems.

Let’s structure the analysis according to some criteria, like choice range, prices, support level and reliability.

1. Advantages of the hotel reservation systems

1. Extensive choice. If you look not for the particular hotel but just for the hotel in city X, than reservation online systems bring you the bingo. Most of them have wide range of the hotels starting from hostels and ending with luxury accommodation. For each city you can find from 10 to 300 hotel options. Beside this, the systems have integrated search forms where you can specify you particular criteria, like “pets allowed”, “close to airport” and so on. Such kind of systems like Booking.com or HotelDiscounts.net have 30000 – 50000 hotels in their database.

2. Lower prices. You would be surprised, but the analysis showed that the hotel rates at the booking systems are lower than at the hotel websites (does not hold in every case though). For example directly-booked double room at the Ghent River Hotel (www.ghent-river-hotel.be/ENG/index.html) is 30% more expensive comparing to the same double room at the reservation system from “OrangeSmile Tours” (bookings.orangesmile.com/hotel/be/ghentriver.html). This comes from the fact that the reservation systems have higher turnover and they can allow some discounts or direct special agreements with the hotels.

3. English online support. Both booking systems and hotels provide online and telephone 24/7 support for their clients.
However, e-mail response time from the booking systems is much faster in general, because they have dedicated support teams, while a hotel administration normally checks e-mails once per hour. Second, for the English-speaking clients, in case of appearing problems, it is sometimes difficult to communicate by phone with hotel officers in France, Spain, Italy or Greece. While the support at the reservation systems speaks always good-English.
4. High reliability. The reservation systems normally develop their own software and hardware infrastructures themselves, so they have high expertise in the security, reliability and maintenance domains. In opposite, hotels do not have that much expertise and power in developing their own solutions, so they sometimes have that kind of craft-made booking system.

2. Disadvantages

1. Absence of hotel chains. Most centralized booking systems lack major hotel-chains (Accor, Formula1, Marriott International, Hilton) in their databases. That happens due to the fact, that these chains normally sell rooms via their own dedicated booking centers and refuse to cooperate with the global reservation systems.

2. Fully booked situations. Sometimes you can ask a hotel for reservation directly in the situation when in all booking systems this hotel is fully booked. Most of the hotels keep a number of rooms for emergency situations and might give a room to you if you call them at the reception.

As we can see from this analysis, the centralized hotel reservation systems have more benefits than drawbacks. However, as in all aspects of life, it is better to keep both booking options in mind, and use them according to your current situation.