Best Online Hotel Deals

May 16, 2010, By Josh Katzowitz 0 comments

Josh Katzowitz

A hotel makes or breaks your vacation. Stay too far away from the sights and the sounds and your vacation suffers. Stay in a crappy area of town and your vacation gets mighty dangerous. Stay in a hotel where the bed bugs bite and you get to bring home some unwanted souvenirs.

Two examples from my experiences:

The wife and I stayed in a small, rather shabby hotel on the outskirts of Seville, Spain. We attended a wonderful flamenco dance while there and we spent some time walking around what is, in fact, a beautiful city. But the hotel – and its location – wrecked it for me. I remember walking two miles to dinner from our hotel on cracked-out streets with the sweat running down my legs and thinking, “This hotel sucks.” To this day, Seville might be my least-favorite city in Western Europe simply because of my woeful lodging experience.

A few years earlier, we stayed at a charming, cozy hotel in Florence, Italy, a few steps away from the Basilica di Santa Croce. Every morning, we’d wake up in our tiny, yet charming room, and walk down the stairs to breakfast and say, “Buon giorno” to the waitress. She’d always reply, while carrying her tray of breakfast liquids and in her sing-songy, voice “Buon giorno. Café? Cappuccino? Latte? Chocolatte?” We still joke about that. The hotel was one of the reasons Florence is one of my favorite cities in the world.

You see, so much of it is about the hotel. True, you’re not spending most of your time there, and yes, if it doesn’t cause a memorable moment in your vacation, that’s not necessarily a strike against the experience. But a bad hotel makes everything worse.

That’s why we need good hotel websites. We need to partake in the research that lets us know what is acceptable and what is not. We want to know if the hotel caters to our needs, or if the staff is too apathetic to care. We want positive reviews, and we want good prices. We want to know.

And we can.

Much like an online air travel experiment I recently ran, there are a host of well-known and not-so-well-known hotel web sites that can give you a great rate for a low cost. I’ve found four for us to try in another experiment.

Using only websites – no phones or travel agents – I’ll try to find the best deal on three random trips where I’m looking for a two-star and a four-star hotel in each city. My four sites of choice: Hotels.com, Laterooms.com, Kayak.com and Orbitz.com. I’m booking hotels a month from the day I penned this piece, and my stay is lasting a week. In my imaginary travels, I’ll be journeying to Toronto, Buenos Aires and Chicago, and I’m staying within 10 miles of the city center.

A quick note: Although I’ve been impressed when I’ve used Priceline.com – it lets you negotiate with a hotel based on how fancy you want your hotel to be, but the site doesn’t clue you in on the hotel you’re booking until you’ve already agreed on a price – I’ve kept them out of this experiment. The same goes for Hotwire.com.

And even though I’ve used Tripadvisor.com plenty – where you find reviews galore and, for the most part, reviews you can actually trust – the site doesn’t offer bookings or deals, so I’ve left them out as well.

Here were the results of my experiment, which occurred on a Friday afternoon. Remember, I’m looking for the cheapest two-star and four-star hotels I can find in each city and to see if any one of these sites can top the others in showing me the best deals. The price reflects the average nightly rate for two adults.

Toronto (two-star)

Hotels.com: $60 at the Super 8 Motel Toronto East

Laterooms.com: $110 at the Days Hotel Conference Center

Kayak.com: $59 at the Quality Hotel and Suites

Orbitz.com: $88 at Isabella Hotel and Suites

Toronto (four-star):

Hotels.com: $136 at the Westin Prince Toronto

Laterooms.com: $130 at the Yorkland Hotel

Kayak.com: $134 at the Sutton Place Hotel

Orbitz.com: $176 at Pantages Suites

Buenos Aires (two-star)

Hotels.com: $41 at the Hotel Mundial

Laterooms.com: $55 at the B&B Frossard

Kayak.com: $42 at the Concorde Hotel

Orbitz.com: $41 at the Hotel Mundial

Buenos Aires (four-star)

Hotels.com: $77 at the Park Chateau Unique Hotel

Laterooms.com: $83 at the Mayflower Suites

Kayak.com: $103 at Claridge Hotel

Orbitz.com: $86 at the Hotel Reconquista Luxor

Chicago (two-star)

Hotels.com: $87 at the Red Roof Inn Downtown

Laterooms.com: N/A

Kayak.com: $64 at the Write Inn

Orbitz.com: $55 at the Howard Johnson Downtown

Chicago (four-star)

Hotels.com: $98 at the Hotel Felix

Laterooms.com: $200 at the Grand Plaza

Kayak.com: $94 at the Hotel Felix

Orbitz.com: $105 at the Whitehall Hotel

The results: a mixed bag, which is to be expected, though. Kayak’s average rate is a few cents cheaper than Hotels.com. But remember this: when you see a price too good to be true, it usually is. If you find a hotel room for $41 in Buenos Aires, it can mean one of two things: you’re booked during a light tourism season, or the hotel is dreadful. Either way, read the reviews from fellow travelers. Do some research.

A cheap price might seem like a great find. But a cheap hotel can ruin a vacation. 

Josh Katzowitz lives in Atlanta and covers the NFL for CBSSports.com. He is a featured contributor to ManoftheHouse.com and author of the book, Bearcats Rising. He's currently working on a book about pro football that is scheduled to be released in 2012.