Want best rates? Call the hotel

Kansas – If you believe TV commercials with talking lawn ornaments and animated bellhops, you might think you’re getting the best price when you book a hotel online.“I did,” said Bob Zandt of Wichita.

But when he booked a room in Goodland through an online service in August, he wound up paying $108 for a room that regularly rents for $77 a night.

Online travel experts say that’s not unusual.

They say behind the glitzy marketing campaigns lie hidden fees, tax charges that are the subject of lawsuits, manipulation of online search engines to get your attention and low-price guarantees that aren’t worth the photons marching across your monitor screen.

Bill Carroll, a senior lecturer at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University in New York, said negotiating directly with a hotel will probably yield the lowest price.

Any time you book online, you should expect to pay some cost for the convenience, he said.

But he said things have gotten increasingly dicey since the big travel sites, in an effort to compete with each other, have signed on thousands of “affiliates” — essentially miniature travel agencies that largely make their own rules and add extra charges.
“What you’re seeing there is the tip of the iceberg and there’s a lot of ugliness under the ice,” Carroll said. “It’s caveat emptor (buyer beware) in the wild hospitality west.”

Online travel industry officials say they provide a valuable service for travelers and that the fees on users are how they get paid for the work they do.

Online reservation systems “require and have required millions and millions of dollars of investment,” said Art Sackler, executive director of the Interactive Travel Service Association, a Washington-based group that represents and lobbies for online travel services.

“They are charging for the service, which is predicated on those terrific Web sites which are easy to use and multifunctional,” he said.
The online services’ fees “represent a return on the investment in the service and some sort of reasonable return.”

Taxes, fees and guarantees

Zandt’s experience offers a window into how the online travel business works. Usually, the rate that an online travel service pays to a hotel is invisible to consumers and taxes and fees are combined on the bill to keep competing companies from “reverse-engineering” the rate.
But the receipt Zandt got — by accident, according to industry officials — showed that the hotel actually was paid $69.56 for his room. The online site charged him $86.95.

In addition, the online service tacked on a hefty $21.44 charge for “taxes and fees” for a total of $108.39.

The actual tax paid on the room was $7.34, meaning Travelocity paid $76.90 total.

A check of 11 online travel service Web sites found that a traveller who booked the same hotel as Zandt online would spend $4.50 to $17.33 more a night, compared to calling the hotel directly.

The eight that listed the hotel showed a basic rate for the room of $89.95 or $90 — $4.50 to $4.55 more than the hotel’s “rack rate” of $85.45.

The rack rate is the undiscounted published price for a room that anyone off the street can get.

On top of the basic rate, the online sites added taxes and fees ranging from $9.49 to $21.84.

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