Could use some hotel/travel help

[Alan Mosca]

You're not using the 'name your own price'  tool are you? Try that. You can
narrow it by area, star level and bid your own price.
On 26 Sep 2013 12:07, "Smylers" <Smylers at stripey.com> wrote:

> Alan Mosca writes:
>
> > I've got one word for you : Priceline.
>
> OK, I've never used Priceline before so just had a look to see what they
> can find for our London trip.
>
> > You can easily get sub 100$ per night and have a 4*, depending on
> > period.
>
> The dates were fixed for us (we're attending a wedding).
>
> I dispute “easily”. By default it searches all of London, which is
> surely useless for everybody. It doesn't allow narrowing down by
> postcode or Tube station. Admittedly it does offer to search by
> proximity to golf courses, but regrettably directions for venues tend
> not to mention those in the way they do postcodes and stations.
>
> So I'm left reading through a long list of ‘other landmarks’ to work out
> which one is likely to be nearest to where we want to stay, then going
> through the resulting hotels list, adjusting the distances given to
> allow for the delta between the location we actually want to search near
> and the one it let us search near.
>
> At which point it turns out that some of the purported hotels in the
> list are actually hostels or apartments.
>
> So far as I can tell we can get actual, non-scummy, hotels for $182 or
> $239. Which admittedly is less than £189, but still way over the $100
> you mentioned.
>
> Oh, except that there's an extra mysterious[*] ‘taxes and fees’ added at
> checkout, which I'm guessing is VAT, making the $182 actually $218 per
> night (which, when translated to sterling, is exactly the same price
> that Booking.com quote for that room on those dates).
>
> [*] Mysterious in the sense that they don't even try to justify how they
> calculated that particular charge for this booking, just waffling on
> about the kinds of things they cover.
>
> > YMMV.
>
> Apparently it did.
>
> Having already checked Booking.com, Priceline didn't find anything
> additional or provide better rates. And nor was it's interface so slick
> or process so helpful that I'm wishing I'd used it instead of
> Booking.com.
>
> Smylers
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