Mediocre Rates at Mediocre Hotels in the World's Most Average "Popular" Cities...
Written: Apr 20 '04
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I love to travel. I mean, really love to travel. But I don't love paying high prices for travel. So naturally, whenever I hear about a new web site that claims to offer ways to save money on anything having to do with travel, I click my way over to check them out. I recently heard some chatter about a site called HotelClub.com, and figured I'd give them a shot and see what they bring to the table.
What HotelClub.com is All About...
Don't get fooled by the word "club" in the name, and don't get immediately scared off by the links to "membership". This isn't really a club at all, it's just yet another web site from the Cendant Corporation, providing yet another vaguely familiar looking hotel search tool to confuse the market. You can book hotel rooms via this site, but given the problems it has, who would want to?
The "club" is just a gimmick to differentiate the site from the myriad other (generally better) hotel booking engines out there. Each time you book via the site you earn "Member Dollars". You can also earn by referring new members to the site. Save up the dollars and trade 'em in for discounts on future reservations.
Yawn. I'll bet you still do better with any major hotel frequent guest program -- especially if you do a Double-Dip at Hilton...
How's Useful is the Site?
Glad I asked. The answer is "Not very."
It's not that the interface isn't easy to understand -- it is. It's not that it's a particularly ugly site -- it's not. My complaint with the utility of HotelClub.com is the extremely limited selection of properties in an EXTREMELY limited number of countries. I give HotelClub.com a D- on utility, and it's almost completely due to their horrible selection. Here's where I'm coming from...
For a site whose banner says "Your Worldwide Online Hotel Reservation System", I can't help but feel cheated. After all, how "worldwide" is a site on which you can't even find a single hotel room in any of the world's five largest cities?
The only countries represented on this site are the U.S., the wealthiest European countries, Japan, and Australia -- that's about it. Africa doesn't exist in HotelClub.com's idea of "worldwide". Neither does South America for that matter. Ditto with countries in Central America, Southeast Asia, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, etc. etc. ad infinitum...
Headed to the Olympics? Lucky you! Unlucky you though if you're a HotelClub.com "member" because you can't book rooms in Greece through this web site!
Thinking about a vacation to the wonderfully warm waters of Cancun or Acapulco? Whoops! No Mexican cities here either. And never mind that Mexico City is an enormous city of more than 20 million people, not to mention at least a thousand hotels... Ditto with enormous countries and burgeoning young economies in places like India and China -- no room in those countries' inns if you count on HotelClub.com.
Needless to say, I find HotelClub.com ridiculously inadequate as a "worldwide" reservation system. Such claims are blatant puffery at best, and just plain outright lies in a more truthful world.
Even when you do pick a city that's represented on the site, the selection is beyond horrible. You're offered only the slimmest fraction of what you'd find on better reservation sites (including the biggies like Travelocity or Expedia).
As an acid test, I tried to see what it would give me for Houston. It returned just a slim dozen hotels, mostly of the 2-star Comfort Inn type quality level, and none with particularly good rates that I couldn't easily beat on other reservation web sites. 12 hotels. Heck, I can find more hotels than that in 2 mile stretch of I-10. Every other hotel booking engine does better. Travelocity shows me about 100 hotels for Houston, and even then, that list is nowhere near comprehensive, but at least it's a reasonable starting point.
Tried Washington D.C. too -- gotta be hundreds of hotels in and around the capital city -- but with HotelClub.com, I find 11 properties total, and the "best deal" was $97 a night at a Red Roof Inn. Be still my throbbing hotel-loving heart!
How Well Designed and Implemented is the Site?
Overall, the site is fairly well designed and easy to use -- mostly because it borrows so extensively from the look and feel of sites like Hotels.com. It's basically a simple interface -- plug in the destination name and use the calendar tool or pull-downs to choose a date, and away you go...
Extra credit for the good range of languages supported: French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese -- internationalized sites are good stuff. What a shame that the site doesn't offer any hotel properties anywhere worth going to...but I think I already beat that horse.
Perhaps the limited range of available properties explains the lack of a "Show More" button on all the screens where you'd expect to see it.
Some of the site's features aren't that well implemented. I tried clicking the button to organize by location, figuring that I'd get something like the list of hotels based on distance from either the city center or a user-defined point of interest. Nope. It listed them alphabetically based on a keyword for "Area", which didn't have much meaning since several of them were listed as "Houston" -- these were mostly the ones that were about as far from downtown Houston as possible without being more truthfully described as "Chicago".
A lot of travel sites have poor engineering when it comes to designing web pages for making reservations. HotelClub.com is no exception. They require a field for "guest name" to be entered in an unusual place (next to the room type requested), then have a totally separate field where the name must be re-entered in the billing info area, without carrying one name field to the other -- that might make sense if the screen didn't complain if you put different names in the two. Come on, guys! Either use a single field or don't put in stupid error checks! Sheesh. This usability stuff ain't rocket science!
Is the Site Trustworthy?
In a word, "No"!
If you're thinking of using HotelClub.com, understand the terms and conditions well (and believe me, it's hard to find them)!!! Be especially aware that HotelClub.com charges 15% fees if you cancel or change your reservation, and if you cancel less than FIVE (5) DAYS ahead of time, you will forfeit THE ENTIRE amount of your reservation.
This policy is UNACCEPTABLE! You can almost always do better by booking direct with the hotel, often getting the same rate or better, and with the industry standard condition that you must cancel by 6pm (or thereabout) on the day of arrival.
If you are willing to accept HotelClub.com's consumer-hostile terms, you might as well as book via Priceline or Hotwire and save more money.
How are the Prices?
Comparing prices on hotel web sites isn't always as straightforward as it should be. Taxes are additional at some sites, some sites have "gotcha" booking fees that don't show up until you book, and some sites hide certain details as part of their way of doing business (mostly the "opaque" booking sites, Priceline and Hotwire).
Prices at HotelClub.com seem average. Not outrageously high, nor outrageously low. Of the 11 properties in Washington D.C. that were listed, most were priced between $100 and $200 per night for 4-star level properties. That's about right, but you can do similarly well any day of the week by just calling around or surfing on over to any other hotel booking site out there.
Unfortunately, I didn't see so much as one single price (even under the "Bargains" headings) that made me want to click that "Book It Now" button...
As an unrepentant bargain hunter in the travel world, the lack of good prices is probably HotelClub.com's biggest failing and the biggest reason why I don't recommend them. The bottom line is that with mediocre prices on a far-below-average range of properties in an inadequately narrow geographic range, HotelClub.com is a useless site with a silly gimmick.
I can do better on other hotel web sites. So can you....
Recommended:
No
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HotelClub.com
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