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Finding a suitable hotel room and paying the appropriate price for it is not as simple as it should be, neither in Thailand nor in other travel destinations around the world.
Do a search with any of the major search engine, the search results will likely include hundreds of hotel bookings sites, including advertisements for them. You will be lucky if you can find the real website of the hotel you searched for within the first 3 pages.
So, basically the search engines still let us down in this regard. Travel guides still remain a better source for screening hotel locations and their price categories. If you are lucky looking for a hotel in Thailand, you could have found our directory of websites of more than 900 hotels and resorts in the country. Browsing the websites of the individual hotels is probably still the best way to find your favored hotel. Possibly you can book with them online, but before you do this you should compare their rates, with the rates offered by various hotel reservations sites. The rates offered on the website of the hotel in question should be the lowest available (in our opinion), but most likely they aren't.
As mentioned above, a quick search with search engines, will give you a lists of hundred of hotel bookings sites, where you can make your room reservations. Most travel related websites will also have a few banners and ads linking you to these sites. Unless you know the brand name, there is little you know about the quality of the services they provide. Most likely though it will be a straigtforward process.
Just recently we discovered an alternative and promising way of going about booking a hotel room. The service featured on our website* checks up to 30 different major hotel room reservation providers and compares the rates they offer for individual hotels. Perusing this service, you will notice there are still important differences between the rates offered by various providers for the same hotel room.
[Typically hotel reservation services get about 15% commission on any sales. If you reach them through a link on a website (which will likely be what is called an 'affiliate' link), the website will get around 3-5% of the total sales.]
Before booking with any the service provided above, we also suggest you check out www.agoda.com **. They feature the following statement on their site :
"If you can find another available room in the same category as ours for less, we'll match the lower rate." Not sure how that works in practice, but at least it strongly suggests that their rates are competitive.
* If checking out rooms on this site, we usually get around 15 baht commission
** If booking through this service, we will get a 3-5% commission
of the total sale price
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