Last week, I wanted to stay in Richmond-upon-Thames before heading home from London Heathrow Airport the next morning. After checking reviews, I narrowed my search to two independent hotels: The Selwyn Hotel and Bingham Riverhouse. Next, I had to figure out the best way to book either hotel. Should I book directly with the hotel? Should I use a credit card portal to earn extra points and (in some cases) make use of card-portal credits? Should I book through a major online travel agency, and perhaps earn portal rewards by clicking through to a site like Expedia? Should I book through Gondola to earn cash back? Should I book through Rove Miles to earn transferable points? I checked all of these options, and the results were surprising…
The Selwyn Hotel
Hotel Rate: ~$409 (refundable)
The hotel’s website wanted to charge me 305 GBP, after taxes, for a refundable rate. Surprisingly, this was the second-worst option I found.
Expedia Rate: $245 (non-refundable), $274 (refundable)
I found it amazing how much cheaper this was than the hotel’s rate! Note that I was logged in to Expedia, and so I qualified for member rates when available.
Within $10 of Expedia Rate
The following sites offered similar pricing as Expedia (plus or minus $10):
- Rove Miles: $253 (non-refundable), $274 (refundable). Even though Rove Miles was slightly more expensive than Expedia for a non-refundable booking, it would have been a better choice since it offered 17.1x points (in addition to credit card earnings). Since Rove Miles are transferable to several airline programs, this would have been a great option if no sites were significantly cheaper than Expedia.
- Bilt: $253 (non-refundable), $281 (refundable). Now that Bilt offers direct hotel bookings (see this post for details), I had hoped that they also had access to better rates somehow. In this case, though, the rates were slightly higher than Expedia’s rates (but still within $10).
- American Express: $252 (non-refundable), $281 (refundable)
Better than Expedia rates
The following sites offered rates that were more than $10 cheaper than Expedia:
- Capital One: $231 (non-refundable), $251 (refundable)
- Citibank: $213 (non-refundable), $237 (refundable) [best overall]
Worse than Expedia rates
The following sites offered rates that were more than $10 pricier than Expedia:
- Chase: $292 (non-refundable), $324 (refundable). Yuck! Chase’s rates were almost 20% higher than Expedia’s!
- Gondola: $457 (refundable). Gondola earned the distinction of being the only site with a rate worse than the hotel’s own. In fact, this rate was approximately double Citi’s rate! Ouch!
Bingham Riverhouse
Based on the results for the Selwyn Hotel, above, you’d think that Citi and Capital One are particularly good options, whereas Chase and Gondola are particularly bad, and everything else is in between. It’s not that simple…. Not even close…
With this hotel, all rates were refundable…
Hotel Rate: $342
After taxes, the hotel rate for a standard double room came to 255 GBP (approximately $342).
Expedia Rate: $290 [best overall]
Once again, Expedia was cheaper than booking directly through the hotel.
Within $10 of Expedia Rate
The following sites offered nearly similar pricing as Expedia (plus or minus $10):
- Amex: $297
- Capital One: $298
- Chase: $298
- Bilt: $298
Better than Expedia rates (none)
None of the sites I checked beat Expedia’s pricing
Worse than Expedia rates
The following sites offered rates that were more than $10 pricier than Expedia:
- Citi: $313. So much for Citi being the best option!
Unavailable
The hotel wasn’t available to book through these sites:
- Rove Miles
- Gondola
Richmond Conclusion
If I had stopped looking after checking prices for the Selwyn Hotel, I would have concluded that Citi’s hotel prices are great, Capital One’s prices are pretty good, and Chase’s and Gondola’s prices are awful. However, that pattern didn’t hold when examining the Bingham Riverhouse. In that case, Expedia had the best price, and almost all other sites were very close behind, except for Citi. Citi had the worst price!
For those curious, I ended up booking the Selwyn Hotel through Capital One because I wanted to use up travel credits. It was a tough call, though, because I could have booked it cheaper through Citi or earned great rewards through Rove Miles. As expected from the reviews, the hotel’s rooms were very small; however, the hotel was great in other respects.
Bonus Case Study: Asheville
A relative has a big birthday coming up and asked for a two-night stay at the Flat Iron Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. I checked all the sites again. Here’s what I found…
Hotel Rate: $518
For two nights, after taxes, the hotel rate for a standard room came to $518 all-in.
Expedia Rate: $523
Expedia was very slightly more expensive than the hotel itself.
Within $10 of Expedia Rate
The following sites offered similar pricing as Expedia (plus or minus $10):
- Bilt: $527
- Rove Miles: $529. Rove Miles offered 12.3x points for this booking.
Better than Expedia rates
The following sites offered rates that were more than $10 cheaper than Expedia:
- Capital One: $512
[Note that this one just barely made the cut since it’s only $11 cheaper than Expedia] - Gondola: $466 [best overall]
Worse than Expedia rates
The following sites offered rates that were more than $10 pricier than Expedia:
- Chase: $589
- Amex: $589
Unavailable
The hotel wasn’t available to book through these sites:
- Citibank
Asheville Conclusion
This is crazy. Gondola has the best price?! In the UK, Gondola had the second-worst price for one hotel, and couldn’t find availability at the other. I haven’t booked this stay yet because I was really hoping to book through Citi. I recently got the Strata Elite card. It comes with a $300 per calendar year credit for 2-night or longer hotel stays booked through Citi. This two-night stay would be perfect if only Citi could find an available room (and price it reasonably)!
Overall Summary and Conclusion
Summary
This table shows how many times the pricing within each site was better than Expedia, roughly the same as Expedia, worse than Expedia, or unavailable:
| >$10 Better than Expedia | ~Same as Expedia | >$10 Worse than Expedia | Hotel Unavailable | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel Website | 1 | 2 | ||
| Amex | 2 | 1 | ||
| Bilt | 3 | |||
| Capital One | 2 | 1 | ||
| Chase | 1 | 2 | ||
| Citibank | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Gondola | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Rove Miles | 2 | 1 |
Conclusion
I was hoping to offer some guidance on which sites are worth checking when booking independent hotels. What I found, though, was that the results were all over the map. Sometimes Citi was the best. Sometimes Citi was the worst. Sometimes Citi couldn’t find available rooms at all. The same story can be said for Gondola. So, again, there’s no simple answer to which is best. Unfortunately, aggregator sites, like Kayak, don’t check prices on bank portals or specialty sites like Rove Miles or Gondola.
For now, it seems that the best approach is to log into every site you have access to to find the best deal. Note that I purposely didn’t cover some additional complexities such as whether it’s better to earn 8x to 12x from a bank portal or 17x or more from Rove Miles or 30x (or whatever) from Capital One Shopping; or whether paying with points is a better deal than earning points; or whether it makes sense to use up card-portal credits even when the price is higher. Those are topics for another day.
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[…] terms, and which portal or credit card perks you want to use. As Frequent Miler pointed out in their post on independent hotels, sometimes the smartest move is simply logging into every site you have access to and seeing what […]
The “availability” factor is huge when it comes to being able to book small, independent hotels. Like this comment below, I’ve consistently found that many small indie hotels in Greece are only listed on Booking.com / Agoda (owned by Booking.com). As Citi’s portal uses Agoda for booking, this means that those indie hotels show up in their portal (though notably, holiday apartments do not, despite them showing on Booking.com / Adoda).
Looking at options for a small seaside town in Greece, Citi’s portal showed 4 hotels; Capital One showed 1 (not on Citi’s list, and slightly outside the town), and Chase showed zero. This is especially relevant to me in terms of comparing the “coupon” travel credits with each card.
For the same town, Hotels.com (owned by Expedia) showed zero offerings. Expedia itself showed one house rental by Vrbo.
Unlike the comment I linked, I found the booking.com price before a Genius level 2 discount applied to be practically the same as Citi’s price (exactly the same as Agoda’s price), which meant that the Genius level 2 discount was a real 10% lower than Citi’s portal (when the 10% is offered). Now, that would be arguably negated by getting 10x or 12x booking with a Strata Premier or Elite via Citi’s portal, but then you can also get 7x MR points back currently via Rakuten on Booking.com — so booking.com remains the winner.
One other thing to add: I’ve noticed in the past (not on this research above) that when going through Rakuten or other portals to book hotels, the price was sometimes higher than if I didn’t go through a portal. It’s a shady practice if that is indeed happening.
I have similar findings and usually just use hotels.com because that’s the one I am used to. The outrageous part is that every hotel claims that you save by booking directly and that is almost never the case.
Also, throw in the fact that you can often buy Hotels.com gift cards on sale, and that helps as well.
Another thing to consider is if Amex or C1 for instance provide perks for a particular hotel.
For example we were in the Eliot Hotel in Boston and they are part of C1’s Lifestyle Collection.
That gave us a $50 credit to use at the hotel.
I mean, perhaps the lesson here is that there are so many good options now for independent hotels. There’s an argument to be made that you should just shop the hotel, then find the deal. I personally have found Priceline to beat Expedia in a number of cases (all domestic), and Cap 1 shopping often has generous cashback rates. Expedia does seem to have the widest inventory overall, so that’s a good place to start to narrow down properties you want. Now, how to compare 10x C1 miles vs. 20% C1 shopping rewards vs. 14.1x Rove miles on something similarly priced? That seems so hard to do.
One thing that frequently drives me to independent hotels is location. If I am staying somewhere more than one night I try to find an actual neighborhood I want to experience, and more often than not my options are independent hotels.
Off topic For your friend going to Asheville. If they have the Amex gold card, Chestnut on Biltmore Ave is on Resy and they can use the $50 coupon.
Citi is definitely improving. I checked out a 2-night stay at a beachside Crowne Plaza in the EU, and Citi was cheapest across all portals and platforms, and significantly cheaper than IHG’s member non-refundable rate. Of course, there would be a tradeoff of no elite benefits/points and no portal earn (best I saw was 6X via Cap1 portal). But I have seen this with independents also, like you have. Citi portal will definitely be a must-check for me now, especially with 12X from Strata Elite.
Don’t forget to add your card to Simply Miles and activate those offers. Doing so does not conflict with the booking channels
I find different sites have advantages in different regions.
I am curious how Agoda and Booking.com compared?
as somebody who has been doing a lot of hotel shopping for our upcoming trip to Crete, where it is 95% independent hotels. Booking has been our go to for finding hotels, then we check prices. We especially like how each room type typically has pictures of what you are getting. We’ve found the rates, as “genius lvl 3” slightly better than Expedia, and almost exactly on par with Citi. All the travel portals have been far lower then the hotel websites with the exception of Chase, which we have found to be +20ish% in almost all cases.
I was pretty bummed about the sapphires losing the 1.25-1.5x cash redemption through the portal coming up, but it seems they have just jacked up the prices so high nobody would even consider using points to pay anyways.
Great article about comparative pricing. In my experience, each booking is its own thing. There’s no silver bullet booking platform. One must go through the exercise each time. In the end, the added complexity that you note and didn’t discuss (earn rate) is often the driving economic factor.
When you pull up a particular hotel and input the date ranges in Google Maps, you get quite an extensive price list from various booking sites. Is that list fairly trustworthy in identifying the cheapest price among the non-portal prices?
Yes, that’s a great way to find the best price across public sites, but it doesn’t list prices for sites where you have to log in as a member to see the pricing (such as bank portals). Sometimes the data is slightly out of date, though, and you’ll find that the cheapest rate isn’t really available once you click through.
I book a lot of independent hotels and usually check several portals each time. I have seen similar results and almost always find that there is a portal with cheaper prices (and sometimes a lot cheaper) than booking direct. Initially I was just trying to use up various credits, like $150 Delta Stays, $300 Capital One, $50 Chase Sapphire Preferred, etc. But now I often book through these portals anyway for cheaper rates and bonus points. I haven’t found much of a pattern to which portal will be the cheapest except that until recently it was never Citi. But it sounds like that has changed.
I’m not sure when it happened, but Citi used to be powered by Booking.com and at that point I always found it to be consistently higher than all other portals. But I recently booked through them (to use the new $300 credit) and they were powered by Agoda and were only a bit more expensive than the cheapest portal I found (Hotels.com). I assume the shift from Booking.com to Agoda is the reason.
What about Hyatt dot com for these that are MMS like Bingham Riverhousr
Oh rats, I forgot to record that price. I believe that booking through Hyatt offered the same terrible price as booking through the hotel directly. I just checked another date and that’s still the case.
I primarily look at AAA hotel rates and hotel rates directly from the hotels. The rates are usually about the same when I do this. However, after getting the Citi Strata Premier card about a month ago, I started looking at the rates in the Citi travel portal as well since I get 10X for booking hotels in it using the Strata Premier card. To my surprise, a couple of major hotels were noticeably cheaper than booking through AAA and the hotels directly.
So not only is it cheaper, but I earn 10X Citi Thank You points too.
Isn’t there an aggregator that lists all the prices in one place?
Like Trivago or Kayak. I’d be interested in the analysis if it included those aggregation sites.
I realize I didn’t make this very clear, but I was specifically looking at sites where you can earn or use rewards: bank portals and specialty sites like Rove and Gondola. None of those sites appear through aggregators
Skyscanner is an aggregator that I like, I used to use it to find competitive rates and then file Best Rate Guarantee claims with SPG/Marriott. Haven’t tried doing that in many years though.