10 Dec 2012
Hotwire Not So Hot
I’m visiting my Grandparents in Montreal this Christmas. They live in a very small town so the hotel room options are quite limited.
There is only one hotel in this town and the published rate was $94 a night. I decided to hit up hotwire.ca to see if they could get me a deal.
Indeed I could! Hotwire was advertising $88.50/night. Great! So I decided to book. The final total was a little higher than I expected: $215.43. Hmm..
I went to expedia.ca and calculated the price they were offering at $94/night. Total with taxes: $215.26. Looks like expedia have them beat by $0.17.
Price from Expedia
Price from Hotwire
Price from Holiday Inn
Just for fun, I decided to look up the price with Holiday Inn directly: $215.24, a $0.02 savings over Expedia!
It all comes down to the “tax recovery charges and fees” that the individual websites charge.
The Tax recovery charge is a charge that the Hotel charges Expedia or Hotwire that are imposed by them from the government, such as: room tax, excise tax, tourists taxes, etc.. If this is the case, then why are the taxes and fees different for the same hotel room?
To me, it sounds like hotwire is moving some of the cost of the room into the “fees” category in order to display cheaper per night rates.
I’ll stick with booking with the hotel directly, thank you very much. I’m sure I can use the $0.02 that I saved over booking with expedia. Oh wait, I just did… and that’s my two cents on using websites for hotel “deals” 
FYI: The hotel tax in Quebec is 14.98%. Of which it only seems that Holiday Inn is accurately representing in the “Taxes” section.
There’s a “Lit Non Fumeur” in Quebec? Must be the only one.
Seriously though, I feel like the entire hotel industry is one giant rip-off. Take the Sheraton I’m staying at for the conference. The so-called “group discount” rate that I booked through is USD $169/night, but if you go to the Sheraton’s website, you can get the same room for $115/night.
This isn’t just a recent thing — it’s been like this for weeks. I’m sure they know that most of the people staying under the “group rate” are having their bill paid by their employers, so they don’t hesitate to jack you. On top of that, they’re still nickel-and-diming folks: $30 for Internet, $4 for a coffee, etc.
Give me a B&B any day!
Julian Dunn
December 10th, 2012 at 10:48 pmpermalink