Posts Tagged ‘price comparison’

Are London hotels as expensive as people say?

Visitors to London often complain about the high price of hotels. Are they right to do so?

Expensive is a relative term. You can have a wonderful priceless experience or spend little and find it poor value. Value is not easy to define.

What then does the hard data say? London apparently has the 5th most expensive hotels in the world, after Moscow, New York, Dubai and Venice (source: Hotels.com survey).

Another survey by Hogg Robinson showed London hotel prices in 10th place (not as dear as New York, Mumbai and Stockholm among others).

London is only expensive because lots of people want to visit the city for business and pleasure, which naturally keeps prices high. That is the bad news.

But there is good news too. You can still grab value for money in London hotels but only if you search carefully. To achieve this, you should use independent blogs (such as London Hotels Insight) rather than hotel or booking websites which just want you to reserve any hotel as quickly as possible.

Ready for more good news? A separate survey (from the Economist) looked at the most expensive cities for all spending (beyond just hotel prices): this discovered that Paris and Copenhagen for example are a lot more expensive than London.

Hence although London (and its hotels) may appear quite pricey to visitors, this must be understood in comparison with other benchmark cities.

The most important advice is to always book your hotel in London after searching out the best price on the internet. If you book based on just one website’s pricing, you will almost always be missing out on the best rate.

Never be fooled by a best online rate guarantee. It is often hard to enforce this in practice (just try to read the small-print!) as well as being time-consuming.

This article’s writer is a London hotel market “insider” who personally meets hoteliers and regularly compares online hotel rates for London. There is no doubt that there is wide variation between London hotel rates between different websites so you can easily lose money.

There is just one way to ensure that you obtain the very best London hotel deal: you need to use a “meta-search” tool which compares lots of different websites at the same time (preferably more than 20 or 30 sites). It is now as easy to do a one-click search of many websites for the best deal as it is to search a single website.

For example, London Hotels Insight has a price comparison tool which checks more than 30 of the world’s most trusted hotel booking sites to find the best rate in one click.

A hotel meta-search engine lets you feel secure that you’re getting the best possible deal. It also means you’re left with more money to enjoy London’s amazing bars, restaurants and theatres!

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Are London Hotels Overpriced?

Author: Guest Author

Is it really so hard to get a reasonably-priced hotel in London?

Visitors to London often complain about the high price of hotels. Are they right to do so?

Expensive is a relative term. You can have a wonderful priceless experience or spend little and find it poor value. Value is not easy to define.

So what does the hard data say? London comes 5th in the ranking of the world’s most expensive hotels, lagging behind Moscow, New York, Dubai and Venice (the source for this is Hotels.com).

Another survey by Hogg Robinson showed London hotel prices in 10th place (not as dear as New York, Mumbai and Stockholm among others).

London is only expensive because lots of people want to visit the city for business and pleasure, which naturally keeps prices high. That is the bad news.

But there is good news too. You can still grab value for money in London hotels but only if you search carefully. To achieve this, you should use independent blogs (such as London Hotels Insight) rather than hotel or booking websites which just want you to reserve any hotel as quickly as possible.

Ready for more good news? A separate survey (from the Economist) looked at the most expensive cities for all spending (beyond just hotel prices): this discovered that Paris and Copenhagen for example are a lot more expensive than London.

So while London hotels and London may seem expensive to tourists, this must be seen in the context of other leading city destinations.

The most important advice is to always book your hotel in London after searching out the best price on the internet. If you book based on just one website’s pricing, you will almost always be missing out on the best rate.

Do not be taken in by those so-called “best rate guarantees”. They are usually covered by plenty of legal wording to make it as hard as possible for you to enforce them.

The author of this article is an “insider” within the London hotel market and knows for a fact that some hoteliers charge different rates through different websites.

There is just one way to ensure that you obtain the very best London hotel deal: you need to use a “meta-search” tool which compares lots of different websites at the same time (preferably more than 20 or 30 sites). It is now as easy to do a one-click search of many websites for the best deal as it is to search a single website.

For example, the blog on London hotels linked below searches 30+ online booking websites to identify the best London hotel rate within a matter of seconds.

Everyone should use a hotel meta-search engine to get the best London hotel rate. By spending as little as possible on the hotel, it really frees up your budget to enjoy London to the max!

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