Hotel Comparison Shopping

Date of Report: May 22, 2002

One of the most frequently asked questions about Las Vegas is how to go about procuring the best price for your hotel room.

Most seasoned veterans will tell you to forego the package deals and try to strike out on your own or with a knowledgeable travel agent. It shouldn't be too hard to beat most package tour prices.

If you are going to go about this on your own, where do you start? 

Well, if you are looking at the room component, it is a very difficult question to answer. Most seasoned veterans at AVLV tell you to go to the hotel's website and get their price. It will make it easier to comparison shop between similar properties. 

Others bemoan the loss of travelscape, a travel site that was well known as an aggressive hotel broker. It was the search engine behind the LVRS website and many others. 90% of the time, you could get the absolute cheapest deal at travelscape.

There are other hotel brokers as well, most notably  Travelworm, Hotel Discounts, Quikbook and finally Expedia. 

Expedia was the site that bought out travelscape and folded its operations into the massive Expedia travel site. Las Vegas observers had hoped that travelscape's philosophy would translate to the historically sluggish Expedia and not vice-versa.

To solve the riddle of how to book your room component of your trip once and for all, we decided to do some comparison shopping on an upcoming HWTH trip and report the results back here.

The results are summarized in the above table (click on the link and a new window will open for reference). 

Bolded red is worst, bolded black is best. The hotel prices are for comparable rooms and are all quoted without Nevada tax which is currently 9%. 

The first observation is that the people who tell you to run with the hotel's website price are completely wrong. The hotel's quoted rate on a comparable room was cheapest only 48% of the time, and most maddingly it was the most expensive option 33% of the time. 

The loss of travelscape (AKA LVRS) has really hurt. Expedia basically bought them out to rub them out. They learned nothing from travelscape's policies what so ever. As we will see when we price airfares and report back here, Expedia routinely comes in second or third when it comes to pricing. This does not bode well for Expedia in the internet savvy marketplace. Pricing laggards will be swept aside, and Expedia is in danger of this, if they don't right the ship. 

One thing Expedia does well is give you prices. Of the 22 different hotel rooms we asked for, it replied 21 times. So if you are looking for a comparison price on a particular property, Expedia at least would be the place to start. 

Hotel Discounts was our intermediate laggard. It responded 19 out of 22 times, which isn't bad, but it was the cheapest option only 26% of the time which ranked it 3rd out of 5 searches. It did however produce some of our largest savings on the Aladdin (271 dollar savings) and at the Rio (190 dollars).

Travelworm replied just 15 our of 22 times, less than 75% of the time. It returned only 1 most expensive price however. 

Quikbook like all of the other hotel brokers offers hotel rooms in cities all across the country. However, the number of hotels served in Las Vegas is pitifully small. They returned only 6 of 22 requests. However, of those six, 2 were the cheapest and none of their replies were the most expensive option.

Researching prices on the internet with a broadband connection can be a time consuming task. Some people may feel that it's not worth the time and the effort and would rather just book a package or pay a travel agent to do this kind of comparison. 

Our best advice is to narrow your choice down to two or three properties. If price is your number one consideration, start searching with Expedia first. Ferret out the hotels you would like to stay at. With these two or three choices in hand, go to the other sites mentioned and start your cost comparison. Then, go to the hotel's website and see what they have to offer in terms of pricing or specials. 

Our average cost savings for a three night stay was 120 dollars, about 40 dollars per night. Well worth the extra aggravation of comparison shopping.

When you have found the cheapest price for your property, then call the hotel directly and see what kind of discounts they are offering over the phone. You would be surprised what might be available.

Good Luck!