Expedia vs Booking.com for hotels Bookings

Expedia

Originally created by Microsoft, Expedia is one of the biggest and most successful online travel sites in the world. Being based in North America means it’s one of, it not the strongest in this market when it comes to hotel accommodation. These days Expedia is owned by Expedia Group, which also includes sites such as Travelocity and Orbitz – in fact you will find that these are almost the same site, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Expedia's hotel reservation system is a mature product with considerable options. They offer both prepaid and pay-at-hotel options depending on the hotel with their pay-at-hotel offering currently being marketed as “Reserve now, pay later”. Besides hotels and resorts, they claim to offer access to more than 1 million apartments and alternatives accommodations. With the current COVID-19 situation, they also offer information on cleaning practices at the property. As with most of the major travel sites they offer a large range of rooms with free cancellation, as well as some which are fully-refundable. They also have a map where you can see the nearby attractions in the city, although the map itself is fairly basic. Expedia offers quite a lot of information about extra charges that other sites often don’t, including valet parking fees, Wi-Fi fees, pet fees, parking fees and even the deposit you must leave when checking in. Generally speaking, Expedia has fairly high quality hotel reviews and allows you to filter by type of traveler. Unfortunately though they don’t let you filter by room type which some of the competitors offer. You also can’t sort by the worst reviews first which a lot of people want to read. For those with accessibility issues, Expedia offers quite a lot of information like whether each of the public facilities are wheelchair friendly – this information is lacking from almost all competitor sites. When searching, the top search results are usually marked with an “Ad” label and might not necessarily be relevant to your search results so it’s important to keep this in mind. One great feature of Expedia is that is on the search page every image is an image carousel allowing you to compare hotels better without having to click through to every one. One of the best things about booking on Expedia is that each room only shows one price, and then users can add things like breakfast, free cancellation, or change to a “pay-later” type booking by adding extra money. Overall this makes for a much more pleasant booking experience than other sites which often list 5 -10 prices for the same room, each with slightly different options. Generally speaking we find Expedia’s approach to fees relatively transparent, for example cancellation policies and penalties are prominent, and also feature on the checkout page right before you make the booking as a final reminder. Searching on Expedia is a very smooth experience. Besides searching by city, you can also search by country, state/province, airport, train station, attraction, area, or even metro station. The search results are also delivered fast, unlike some other sites.

From a random sample test, we found that Expedia's pricing wasn't particularly impressive. Having said that, the pricing is still relatively in line with other players, in fact Expedia actually had the cheapest prices on a few hotels. In addition you need to remember that Expedia's home market is North America, so it stands to reason that they should be one of the first sites to check out if you're travelling in the United States or Canada.

Expedia without a doubt has the best availability for hotels in North America. From our own tests though we found that they are not always as good in Europe and Asian markets, so it's going to depend on what exactly you are looking for.

Expedia is available on desktop and mobile browser, as well as a mobile app on both Android and iOS. In addition, Expedia is available almost worldwide, which means they support over 35 languages.

Expedia don't charge any extra booking fees or credit card fees, which is in line with most of the other major players. As they offer both prepaid and pay-at-hotel booking options, it might be worth taking this info consideration when you're booking. In terms of payment method, they accept all the major credit cards including American Express, Visa and Mastercard. In addition to that they accept Paypal. They don't however accept Google Pay or Apple pay.

As one of the earliest players in the online travel industry, Expedia has a well-established reputation. While their booking experience is generally considered quite good, they are not particularly well regarded for customer service. In particular, they are known for very long waiting times on the phone. Their mobile apps rate reasonably in the respective app stores, however the scores aren't as good as some of the leading players.

Expedia provides a number of toll-free phone numbers which can be called from varies countries around the world. They also offer a chatbot which can complete a number of simple actions like checking or cancelling your booking without having to talk to a real person. Although they might not be known for answering the phone quickly, unlike some competitors they don’t charge extra any money for service, which means that when a hotel offers free cancellation, even if you speak to a customer service representative it won’t cost you a cent. For the record, you don’t need to speak to anyone to cancel a booking, this can be done directly through the website.

Expedia is always a site worth checking. While they are not known for their customer service, they have excellent available, paricularly in North America, and offer solid prices. In addition, they're been around for more than 20 years, so you can trust that they'll still be tomorrow.

Booking.com

Booking.com is the world’s largest online travel agency, and is owned by Booking Holdings. In terms of market capitalization, it is also the largest in the world. Booking is synonymous with booking hotels all over the world and also owns several other online travel agencies. Booking.com’s size and success along are testament to its overall good experience, relatively good pricing and good reliability. In addition, Booking.com partners with a lot of other small booking sites, so you might already be booking with Booking.com without even knowing it.

Almost all of the hotels on Booking.com offer free cancelation which is particularly important during thesefast moving times. As with all travel sites, make sure that you check the terms before you book but we find they tend to be pretty transparent on Booking.com.

In the past, Booking.com operates only on the “Pay at hotel” method, however recently they’ve also added some rooms which are “Prepay”, whereby you pay online before the stay. Once again this information is fairly transparent so you always know what you’re going to get. In actual fact, even though Booking.com sometimes displays a room as only accepting one type of payment, often when you get to the checkout page you’ll have the option to choose between the two different ones anyway.

One great feature about Booking.com is the ability to book two different rooms in the one transaction, e.g. A nice room for the parents, and a cheaper room for the kids. Most of the other online travel sites do not support this feature.

Booking.com also offers a strong price guarantee, whereby they promise the refund you the price difference if you find a cheaper price on another site. This is interesting as cheaper rooms can indeed often by found on different sites, and by taking advantage of this best price guarantee you can still enjoy the cheaper price while taking advantage of the reputation and reliability of Booking.com. Be aware though that as always, there is some fine print, so remember to check the relevant conditions before relying on this.

As with other sites there’s a good selection of filters and so you can filter only rooms with free cancellation, breakfast included and in a certain area. One area where Booking.com does a particularly good job with is their user reviews. Due to the huge volume of booking they get, they also have a large number of reviews, which means you can assured of getting an honest opinion. Furthermore, presumably due to volume once again, most hotels do a good job at replying to the reviews also.

You can filter by poor reviews also, which is a feature severely lacking on other online travel sites. In addition, you can check the type of room the reviewer stayed in for a review more tailored to your own circumstances. Another interesting feature is that Booking.com allows you to communicate with the hotel directly before you book, so if there’s any information which isn’t covered on Booking.com itself, you can contact the hotel through Booking.com and they’ll reply to you be email.

Their map experience is also pretty good and loads a good number of hotels on the screen at one time, unlike some of the other competitors. Unfortunately at the time of writing it didn’t appear to show the location of all attractions on the map, however it does have an interesting feature where you can search for a specific attraction and it will show you the directions and distance on Google Maps. Booking.com also offers satellite view on thei map, which although some people don’t find very useful, others swear by it to work out exactly where their hotel is sited in relation to other buildings, roads and natural features.

While dependent on hotel, Booking.com also features some images for the specific facilities within the hotel, however they didn’t seem as clear and nicely sorted as some other sites. If you’re reading this while the COVID-19 pandemic is still occurring, there is a section which details the relevant policies and actions being taken by each hotel.

Booking.com definitely has some sharp pricing, but they aren’t neccecarilly the cheapest in the market. If you want to get the cheapest prices you are still recommended to compare the site against a meta search engine to see where you can get the best price. It may also help if you are part of their loyalty program.

Booking.com features over 1.7 properties across the world, making it clearly the leader. This is believed to be made up of 1.3 million hotels and 400,000 rental properties. Booking.com’s coverage is best in Europe, however might not be as good as Asia as some of their competitors. When it comes to North America, their inventory is also quite strong.

Booking.com is very easy to access. It is available in over 50 languages, and can be accessed via their website, mobile website or their mobile app.

Booking.com accepts all major credit cards as well as PayPal. They aren’t known as a company which offers a lot of alternative payment methods, unfortunately if you want to use things like Apple Pay and Google Pay, or other 3rd party payment methods you’re out of luck. They also don’t accept any buy-now-pay-later type payment methods.

Booking.com, although by far the biggest player in the industry, does actually have a reasonable reputation. This is probably due to the fact that they offer free cancellation on most properties which tends to reduce complaints. Overall, their experience is also quite simple and straightforward since they don’t offer flights and other products, which tends to deliver a superior experience.

Booking.com is available by phone or email, however they don’t have any kind of online chat service. You can however contact the property directly through their website and mobile app.

Booking,com is a great solid option which is always worth a check. If you’re going to Europe they are probably one of your best choices. They are often not found on the comparison sites as much, so checking them out directly is always a good choice.