Hotel booking sites compared: Booking.com, Expedia, Wotif, Hotels.com and more

Which sites are easiest to use and have the best prices and range of rooms?

Jodi Bird @jodirbird

Peter Zaluzny @peterzmedia

Last updated: 01 March 2019

We no longer test hotel booking sites. The information below was gathered in early 2019. For more CHOICE recommendations, check out our top 50 product reviews.

Hotel booking sites such as Booking.com, Expedia, Wotif, Agoda and Hotels.com can help you find accommodation around the world, and they can save you the hassle of trawling through hundreds of websites to find the right room.

All claim to offer the best deals, the largest range of rooms, and easy-to-use tools that can help you narrow down options to find accommodation that suits your travel needs. But despite their claims, most aren't as far reaching as their ads would have you believe.

On this page:

How do hotel booking sites work?
Ease of use is the biggest difference
Other things to consider
Do hotel booking sites get you the best deals?

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How do hotel booking sites work?

There are two types of hotel booking sites:

Aggregation services: these are similar to search engines. They gather information from hotel websites around the world so you can search and compare from a single location. However, they don't take your booking. Once you've selected a hotel, the service sends you to the hotel's website or a separate booking service.
Booking services: these offer the same search and comparison functions as aggregation services, but let you complete the booking within the site.

The price is… identical?

Every hotel booking site claims to have the best deals and lowest prices on accommodation around the world. This is technically true, only because every service in our review has access to the same low prices. You may get a good deal, but it's not necessarily exclusive to one website.

We searched for a room in a specific hotel in Melbourne and Paris to assess local and international pricing. In both cases, each website delivered the same prices within a couple of dollars, aside from Orbitz and Travelocity. These companies only provided prices in US dollars, leaving deals dependant on the exchange rate. Even then, prices were within $10 of one another.

Ease of use is the biggest difference

Although price contributed to the overall score, our review mostly focused on ease of use in the search process.

Here is what we experienced when searching for a place to stay, comparing results, and then booking the room.

There are a few steps involved when using a hotel booking site. Step one is to find a hotel in a convenient location. These services generally use three tools to help you narrow down results:

entering an address
filtering by region/district from a dropdown menu or checklist (e.g. Paris CBD)
selecting a hotel relative to local landmarks (e.g. the Eiffel Tower).

At this point, each service provides a list of options that you can browse in a list or via a map. A good service can get you as close as possible without forcing you to jump through a bunch of hoops while providing a functional map that's easy to use. They also list a number of options in a clear, concise manner.

This is where Expedia and Wotif stumble. Maps feel clunky and laggy and they don't utilise as much screen space as they could.
Expedia shows only a marker with a price on the map, with the hotel name appearing when you rollover the marker.
Wotif only shows a marker with the price. This forces you to go back and forward between the map and list of hotels, which is laborious.

The other sites showed a bit more information on their maps, such as hotel name, an image and review information. Hotel booking sites also like to boast about how many results each search throws up, but it's more important for the results to be useful. Some sites have a pretty loose idea of what constitutes accommodation relative to your chosen location. Those that score well in our review provide a large range of accommodation options within reasonable distance of a central location, such as a CBD or tourist spot. In other words, 100 hotels in Paris, for example, is far less useful when 95 of them are in the countryside. We assessed how useful the results were for a range of locations:

Melbourne, Australia
Broken Hill, Australia
Paris, France
Münster, Germany.

Almost all services provide plenty of options in urban centres, and even rural areas in Australia with all but one company listing at least ten locations in Broken Hill. The city of Münster, however, was a bit of a mixed bag. Wotif, Travelocity, Orbitz, Trivago and Expedia had extensive listings compared to the other services, which suggests that these are better options if you're travelling overseas to areas outside major cities. Agoda was the worst performer across the board. It had the least number of options in all locations (within our test parameters) – around half as many as other services.

A good hotel booking site provides a snapshot of essential information – cost, room type, amenities, user ratings and images. Ads and 'deals' are inevitable, but easy to ignore if they aren't too invasive. Default sorting is usually defined by user reviews or the services 'top picks', but well-designed websites let you adjust these based on class (number of stars), and proximity to a particular location. They should also support a range of currencies (though we looked for $AUD by default). Unfortunately, most services tend to falter in this respect. Common problems include:

cluttered interface
excessive scrolling required to compare results
no indication as to what constitutes a 'top pick' or 'best match'.

Some sites make comparisons quite difficult:

Orbitz and Travelocity: Only available in US dollars.
TripAdvisor: Doesn't always display the lowest price first. Sponsored hotels sit at the top of the list which can be confusing (though it does specify that they are sponsored). 'Best value' is the default search option, though TripAdvisor doesn't explain what that means. Limited information on hotel facilities and room types.
Hotels.com: Resets the list every time a new filter is added or removed, which is tedious (particularly on a slow internet connection). "Featured" is the default search option, though Hotels.com doesn't explain what that means.
Trivago: Limited information on hotel facilities and room types.

Booking.com

is the only service in our test that provides a streamlined, easy-to-use comparison tool.

Now that you've found the room you want, it's time to book. Because not all services let you book using their site (sending you to the hotel's website or another site instead), we only assessed the sites that did offer booking, and didn't include this data in the overall score. The sites that let you book are:

Booking.com
Expedia
Wotif
Agoda
Orbitz
Travelocity
Hotels.com

They all require an email address and phone number; payment options are generally pay online straight away, pay online five days before you arrive, or pay at the front desk when you check in; and they allow cancellation or booking alterations through the website. However, Orbitz and Travelocity will process your payment in US dollars.

Other things to consider

Customer support

Booking.com is the only service with robust customer support. It offers web forms, FAQs and local and international contact numbers.

Expedia is also very good, but TripAdvisor and Trivago's help system barely scrapes through, with support largely limited to an online form.

The rest have reasonable online support and contact numbers (though Orbitz and Travelocity charge for calls).

Additional filters and booking facilities

Look for any extra boxes, sliders and selection criteria that help you narrow down the options to a room that suits your needs.

Things like parking information, hotel facilities such as a pool or gym, and airport transfers.

Some even provide information about the surrounding city or town, which includes partnerships with local tourism providers.

Though all services let you easily specify the number of guests, Booking.com is the only site that lets you specify sleeping arrangements using search filters, such as double or twin singles.

Multiple currencies and languages

Though you'll most likely pay for your rooms using your native currency, multiple options are handy if you're using a foreign credit card or travel money card.

Finding better rates

Hotel booking services may claim to have the best deals, but this may not always be the case as the ACCC investigation into Trivago showed. You can score even better rates by:

creating an account with the booking service or joining the mailing lists. Member accounts are typically free and may result in some discounts
regularly checking the hotel booking sites for sales
visiting the hotel website and booking directly
contacting the hotel via email or phone and asking for the best deal. Quoting the price offered by an accommodation service will help your negotiation
taking a chance on a walk-in (we only recommend this in locations with numerous accommodation alternatives)
waiting for last-minute deals.

Accessibility support

If you're travelling with accessibility needs, Booking.com provides comprehensive information on relevant facilities available at each hotel.

Most of the others will have some details or highlight accommodation that's wheelchair accessible.

Expedia and Wotif don't provide any accessibility information.

Review the reviews

Every service offers some sort of review system. This is usually a combination of user reviews, ratings and staff picks, which act as filters.

Though they're usually presented as user reviews, there's no way to be absolutely sure of the source, so use reviews as a guide, not a source of truth.

Look for hotels with a large number of reviews, and note whether the service requires proof that the reviewer has stayed at the location before submitting a review. If not, anyone can comment on the room without having stayed there.

Do hotel booking sites get you the best deals?

Hotel booking sites may promote themselves as having the best deals or the widest range of hotels, but a number of hotel booking sites have been investigated for alleged anti-competitive behaviour in Australia and overseas by local and international regulatory bodies.

This doesn't mean that you should avoid them altogether, but should serve as a reminder that the top result may not be the best, and that it's worth taking the time to research your options before clicking book.

In 2016, the ACCC found that Expedia and Booking.com (as well as their subsidiary sites) were forcing accommodation partners to provide them with the cheapest rates, via parity clauses. This stopped hotels and motels from offering cheaper rates on their own sites, over the phone or at the hotel desk. These clauses have since been removed.
Trivago was taken to court by the ACCC in 2018, for allegedly highlighting or prioritising hotels that paid additional fees to Trivago. These were not always the best deals, despite implying that they were. Since then, Trivago no longer refers to prices in their ads, but the ACCC investigation is ongoing.
In early 2019, Expedia, Booking.com, Agoda, Hotels.com and Trivago were subject to an an enforcement action from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (which is similar to the ACCC). This was related to pressure selling; misleading information regarding discounts and hotel popularity; hidden charges; and withholding information regarding the impact of commission on search results. As of February 2019, these websites have agreed to not engage in these practices.

Stock images: Getty, unless otherwise stated.

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