I was after a room in ballarat, so I used wotif, found a room for 4 nights for $552, seemed a bit much so I checked the motel website, same room was $520, $32 less, so much for these discount sites, they are good to view groups of places at once but please double check, go to motel site to book.
Wotif used to be OK
Now they have been bought by Expedia.
Expedia has always been hopeless, especially for customer service but also for prices.
I no longer use Wotif.
Only used Expedia once…one time too much.
Yes Wotif are now rubbish! Don't use them. I booked a 5 star mystery Sydney hotel. They overcharged me. it was more expensive than the advertised known hotel. I called the CS line (India) They were rude and unhelpful. They do respond to emails or feedback. The are charletans - stay away
ummm that's how they make money. Pretty much all the search engines take a cut. Webjet is another example.
think if hotel direct is cheaper than wotif then wotif might kick them off their site.
These hotel aggrigators do make hotels easier to find, but they are pushing up hotel prices demanding higher & higher commissions.
How on earth did ACCC allowed wotif to be bought by expedia when it obviously means less competition.
Just to repeat someone, I think it's important to emphasise that wotif don't really exist anymore.
They were bought by expedia about 3 months ago, and now they are basically just a rebrand of expedia. Very few unique deals through wotif anymore :(
I used to work in a hotel. Just letting every know that prices on discount booking website (Wotif, Rate2go, lastminutes.com etc.) are controlled by individual hotels and not the company that runs the website. Some hotels will use Inventory Management system to control prices across all their listed websites but some will manually change the inventory and price for each individual websites.
As a general tip, check all your favorite websites before making your booking because often you can find bargains simply because someone in the reservation department "forgot" to increase the price on some websites.
The discount website makes money from booking fees and 10-20% commission of the room sales.
This is what I do when I travel.
Takes 5 minutes to compare a hotel across several sites to get the best deal. Quite often I do end up booking via Expedia, quite often I don't. I go where ever is cheapest.
I would never use Wotif (and IMO they were terrible even before Expedia). Aside from the often non-competitive rates, they have a nasty cancellation fee and process - many other booking sites offer free cancellation, at least on selected properties.
I am a member of a number of loyalty programs, abd always book direct when I can - I suggest ringing hotels direct to see if they will match a rate published on a third party website - quite often they will!
Did you try trivago & hotelscombined?
Out of interest, what is the motel?