There are lots of online travel agencies (OTA) these days and each claim to provide the cheapest rates for hotel bookings. They offer various interesting loyalty programs to gain customers and increase revenue. However, if you search for a hotel and compare its price on all of these websites, you notice that the prices vary. The main problem is the fact that non of these websites can offer you the cheapest price all the time and there are many factors involved. Some of these factors include:
- User’s location
- Increase in price after the first visit
- Hidden taxes and fees
User’s location:
Your location is one of the factors affecting the price. The price of the hotel you are looking at changes when you change your location. For example, the same hotel that costs 70/night for a person living in Europe might be more expensive or cheaper for a person living somewhere else in the world. The prices can even vary for people living in different countries of Europe. Using a VPN can show you the differences in prices and it seems to be a solution for this problem, but not the ultimate one, because it is not possible to check the hotel from all the countries in the world and compare the prices to each other.
Increase in price after the first visit:
Let’s say you are interested in a particular hotel and even check it a few times on different days, or maybe even you try to book it and leave halfway through the process because you are not completely sure about that hotel or your exact itinerary As the tracking solutions of websites are very accurate nowadays, websites can track the user throughout its journey on their websites. Some websites tend to increase their prices after they find out a user has checked a hotel f few times in the past couple of days to make the user book it for a higher price.
Hidden taxes and fees:
You may have noticed that booking hotels has extra fees such as taxes, cleaning, etc. These additional expenses can be frustrating for the user as they need to pay more money, however, it gets more frustrating when these fees are hidden until the last minute. Many online travel agencies hide these fees on their website’s main page and only show them to the user at the last stages of the booking process, which means that the user sees an increase in the price when s/he is about to pay. This can cause inconvenience for the user throughout their booking process.
The free browser extension, Ratepunk, is designed to solve these issues. All you need to do is to install it on your browser and then search for hotels. Anytime you are looking at a hotel, the browser checks the prices from all major booking websites and notifies you if any websites on the internet offer the same hotel cheaper. In this case, you can rest assured that you always book the hotel at its cheapest price.
Furthermore, the price shown to you is the last price that includes taxes and other fees.
Also, having Ratepunk does not mean that you lose possibilities such as “cash back”. You will be notified if there are any websites that offer cashback possibilities in case you would like to book through them.
Not to mention that there are non-popular websites that offer great deals on hotel bookings which users usually do not know about. Installing Ratepunk helps you find those deals on the internet that can save you lots of money.
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