Hotel Booking Sites are Not the Final Answer for Deals

Go direct to the hotel if booking sites claim there's no room at the inn

The Society of American Travel Writers upcoming convention is in Germany. My husband and I signed up for a pre-convention hiking trip in the Black Forest. We are flying into Frankfurt, arriving on a Sunday, with the trip starting in Baden-Baden on Tuesday. We decided to come in a day earlier, spend an additional night in Baden-Baden and hop over the Stuttgart for a day. My husband was stationed in nearby Ludwigsburg and hasn't been there for 30-odd years, and I have never visited Stuttgart at all.

I started looking for hotels. The Hotel Neuer Karlshof was the obvious choice, since it is situated at the railway station and we are coming in from Frankfurt by train and will take the train to Stuttgart and back. The process of checking so-called discount booking sites was an odyssey through the Internet that kept looping me around.

First I tried TVTrip, which links to Booking.com, a Priceline company. When I checked two days ago as research, yesterday to reserve a room and today to write this post, upon entering our arrival and departure dates, I got the identical message that the last room was booked "1 day, 23 hours, 38 minutes ago!" The page did not volunteer a nightly rate. Priceline UK itself replied, "No rooms available. Sorry! Sold out [our requested date went here]".

TripAdvisor also uses Booking.com as the booking engine, so same reply. RealTravel, which quotes a $62.41 rate, also kicks back to Booking.com, which this time reports, "1 Hotel found, 0 Available." What? Trivago also uses Booking.com and of course reports, "Currently no offers can be found." Trying Maplandia landed me back on the RealTravel page, which quoted room rates as "from €55 (approx. £46)". Etc., etc., etc. I tried Agoda, saw that the hotel's rates start at US$76 but also had no availability that night. TravBuddy came back with, "Sorry, this hotel had no rooms available for those dates." ActiveHotels reports that the Neuer Karlshof has "rooms from €55," but informed me that "Unfortunately, this hotel does not have enough rooms available."

Hotels.com claims 90,000 hotels around the globe, but the hotel I wanted wasn't of them. It did offer links to four other hotels, two (Neuer Markt and Neuer Weg) actually in Baden-Baden, the Neuerweg in Wört and totally inexplicably, a link to "Atlanta, Georgia, United States." Expedia and Orbitz don't list the Neuer Karlshof at all. Travelocity automatically brought up IgoUgo, which both told me "We're sorry but we cannot identify the location that you entered" and also boomeranged to a Travelocity Black Forest page with more hotels outside of Baden-Baden than in Baden-Baden.

None of the booking sites that actually offered the Hotel Neuer Karlshof included a link to the hotel's own website, but I did eventually find it through the straightforward, multi-lingual Baden-Baden Convention and Visitors information website. It lists the city's hotels in order of standards from five-star luxury properties to simple unrated guesthouses. For each the site shows a picture, gives an address, indicates the price range for single and double rooms, whether breakfast is included and if so what kind of breakfast, gives the distance from the autobahn and airport, shows amenities and has click-to links to each hotel's website, further information and booking request.

For the record, the Neuer Karlshof website is http://www.hotel-neuer-karlshof.de/. It was renovated recently, reopening in January 2008. We have a reservation for the night we want at €69, which is not out of line when rates are quoted "from €55" on these book sites that proved to be dead ends when it came to actually getting a reservation. The website says that each room is equipped with television/DVD, free Internet access, iron/ironing board, safe and more, and the on-site Cafe Fellow means that we will not suffer from caffeine deprivation if we want to use it to readjust time zones. The breakfasts and the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff were praised numerous times on user reviews, and I don't need a user review to tell me the convenience of a hotel at a railroad station.

If you are frustrated by navigating through numerous booking sites that all seem to use the same hotel-supplied images, the same price quotes and in our case, the same unavailability, and whose main differences seem to be page design, go straight to the hotel's own website. Book online or pick up the telephone and call. A lot less hassle and often more satisfying results.