One of the most enduring axioms about booking a hotel online is the notion that if you look long and hard enough, someone (though usually based in Florida and the owner of two dozen domain names) will undercut the rack rate for a room.
In the late 90s, online agencies did indeed sell off "distressed inventory" (as unsold rooms are known) at relatively low prices. Even if customers were chary of entrusting their credit card details to the Tampa entrepreneur, they could always ring the hotel, quote the price and haggle.
Like BA, the hotel chains were slow to catch up. But the last couple of years has witnessed a great leap forward in the quality of their websites. Some, such as Radisson (radisson.com) and Holiday Inn (holidayinn.co.uk) even claim to be never knowingly undersold.
Are they right? Taking the night of July 23 and the Radisson SAS Champs Elysées as a sample, I found big variations in both the range of rooms available and the prices cited. Expedia quoted £250, Opodo £139, the Italian site Venere.com £189, Hotels.com £137 and Radisson's own site £138. A survey of the Lowry Hotel in Manchester revealed very similar results. Some sites were charging nearly twice as much as others, and the hotel's own (thelowryhotel.com) was the cheapest.
Cutting out the middleman and buying directly from the hotel has other advantages. Hotels are usually a great deal more forthcoming about the facilities available in each room, particularly high-speed broadband or wireless access. In fact, two of the biggest chains have just announced major investments in their internet provision: 99 Starwood hotels (starwood.com) in Europe will be introducing T-Mobile hotspots this year, while Radisson SAS promises to have high-speed wi-fi in every room by the end of 2004.
Just as Ryanair and the full-service airlines squabble over whether Beauvais, an hour's bus ride from the gates of the French capital, qualifies as "Paris", certain hotel chains are keen to point out the geographical licence taken by their rivals. "Travel Inn Gatwick... on the outskirts of Crawley?" sniffs Lawrence Alexander, the commercial director of Jarvis Hotels. "The Travelodge Chester on the A556 in Knutsford is also a case in point. Or the Kensington Hilton - a stone's throw from Shepherd's Bush roundabout."
Ah, you say, but my company can't afford to pay for a four-star. My budget is £100 a night. Is it worth hunting around for a decent three-star hotel? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. At the time of writing, Expedia was offering a three-star near Opéra for £43 and Travelocity for £46. I asked the bid site Priceline.com - which is now, sensibly, concentrating on hotel deals rather than air fares - for a few sample quotes for central Paris on July 23 and the results were equally affordable: £68 for a four-star in the Opéra arrondissement and £57 for a three-star in the Latin Quarter/Montparnasse.
Meanwhile, real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle (joneslanglasalle.com) has a few predictions that might interest readers responsible for planning an away weekend. Brussels, Madrid, Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Budapest and Warsaw are all tipped as cities where supply is likely to exceed demand in the next couple of years.
