3 Easy Steps to Beat Top Travel Agents for The Best Hotel Deals Online
I used to search every single site looking for the best hotel deals.
When I said every single site, I wasn’t kidding! I would have had 10 different tabs open, from Agoda, Booking.com, Trivago to Expedia, Hostelworld, etc.
It is because I could never tell which one was the best site to find cheap hotel deals. Even though they all claimed to be the best, none of them consistently gave me the cheapest hotel deals. Sometimes it was Agoda, other times it was Booking.com or CheapOair that had the best prices.
After years of researching travel deals, I started to recognize a pattern. Booking.com tends to have the best prices for properties in North America, Agoda in Asia, Expedia in the United Kingdom, and Hostelworld in Europe.
It saved me time for my travel research. But at the same time, I had a fear of missing out. What if Agoda had a better price? What if CheapOair had a cheaper vacation package? All these questions were driving me nuts until I figured out that TripAdvisor was a good tool to compare prices from all these websites.
So in this article, I will share with you how to leverage TripAdvisor for hotel deals.
3 Easy Steps for Cheap Hotel Deals
Time needed: 15 minutes.
How to Beat Top Travel Agents for The Best Hotel Deals Online
- Go to TripAdvisor
Enter Hotel Name or Destination, Check In and Check Out Dates, Number of Rooms, Number of Guests
Click Find Hotels
- Filter to match your criteria
On the left, you can filter the search for what you are looking for. One of the best things about TripAdvisor is that you can set the price for “Total Stay + Taxes and Fees”, so you can filter the properties that fit your budget.
- Click View Deal or The Hotel Price
When you find a hotel that you like, you should click View Deal or the hotel price (underlined red in the picture below). It will take you to the website that is currently having that price. The reason is that these websites will tend to give you extra discounts, which will potentially make the total price lower than what you see on TripAdvisor (see example below)
Activate Additional Coupons for Best Hotel Prices
Say when you go to Agoda, scroll down towards the bottom, you will find an option to activate an additional coupon code like below.
After the coupon is activated, Agoda will give out the promo code below the current price
You can enter the promo code at check out and see the final price on Agoda.
You will still have to do a little work for your research, but it will be less time-consuming than scourging different websites to check prices.
Some of the best deals that I have taken advantage of were:
- 1 night at a beachfront hotel in Playa del Carmen close to Fifth Avenue and including breakfast for $50
- 8 days 7 nights at an all-inclusive resort in Cozumel for $700
- 2 days 1 night at the five-diamond Hotel Xcaret Mexico for less than $500 all-inclusive including tours and park activities for two people over two days
If you have limited time and just want to do one search, I have narrowed the best online travel sites here so that you can find the best prices based on the area that you want to go.